| When computers started to become business tools and to assume an essential role in all companies, they were very large both physically and in terms of capital and revenue cost. Indeed, when erecting a new building the company would have to design features especially for the computer. A big room to house it, separate power supplies, large air-conditioning plants, and hoisting gear to lift the bits of computer off a lorry into the computer room.
Once the computer was in place then it was treated very much like the directorial suite. It had its own retinue of staff who were somehow a different breed of people to the rest of the organization, and its own set of security procedures not only to prevent access but to deter enquiries.
The computer users—the accountants and engineers—would approach the building clutching a pile of punched cards or papertape and hand it over to an operator who would take them to the inner sanctum to be fed into the machine to be processed. Some hours later the results of this labour would by placed into a pigeonhole to be collected by the user.
In the early seventies Time Sharing started to become common. We now know this as accessing the computer via a terminal, though in those days it was more typically a mechanical teletype running at 50 or 110 baud, and even quite large installations would only be able to run half a dozen of them. Nevertheless this sent a shiver of excitement throughout the user community. It was possible for a department to have its own interface to this vast resource, and this confirmed a great degree of status. For the first time people felt computing power to be intheir grasp and, although perhaps not driven by need, people wanted access and fought to get it. |
