From this text describing the history of the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, it notes that the University shared the DSIR's (Department of Science and Industrial Research, New Zealand Government) Elliott 503.
The Victoria University of Wellington also went on to install a Burroughs B6700 in 1973, the same path used by the University of Tasmania, exactly 2 years later in 1975.
It had been through Campbell's initiative that Victoria entered in the
late
1950s into a long-term and fruitful relationship with the Applied
Mathematics
Division of the DSIR, one which has contributed to its productive
research output
in this field. It was purely a marriage of convenience. There was no
formal
organisational, teaching or research relationship. The Applied Maths
Division shared
the university's space (moving into the Rankine Brown building from an
attic in
Courtenay Place in 1966); the university shared the DSIR's Elliott 503
computer.
Computers were a new toy. There were 19 in New Zealand at the end of
1964, reported a newly appointed lecturer in computing mathematics, and
likely
to be more than twice that number by the end of 1965. The other
universities had
acquired IBMs (Canterbury first in 1962), which were less powerful than
the
Elliott. Victoria also acquired a small IBM for administrative use and
hired another,
larger one in 1970 for research work, but this was seven or eight times
slower than
the DSIR's. Victoria was planning the rapid development of computing,
its 1968
quinquennial submission reported, but would first await a report to the
government
on university computer needs nationally. In the wake of this report,
$3.5 million
was committed to computer hardware and the University Grants Committee
accepted a tender from the American company Burroughs (though the
government
would have preferred British) 68 to provide
medium-sized computers for five
campuses. Victoria's Burroughs 6700 was installed in September 1973; a
special
function was held in its honour. An American, Bob Gordon, was appointed
head
of a new Computing Services Centre (he went back to southern California
after
just three years, however, with plans to open a restaurant specialising
in fruit soups).
With the Elliott and its Burroughs, Victoria could for a time claim to
be at the
forefront of the new technology; and the Computing Services Centre also
serviced
government departments and businesses, until the private sector caught
up. When
another special grant was given for replacing the now outdated
university system
in 1980, and each university was allowed to go its own way, the
Burroughs was
replaced by an IBM mainframe and the Computing Services Centre's VAX
network
was enhanced.
Paul Cumberworth sitting at the console of the B6700 located in the Kirk building at the Victoria University.
From Paul's recollection of his time there as an operator:
The 6700 was a lower spec machine as I recall - it had Head per Track disk down the back - not sure how many spindles, and the single tape cluster with the 4 drives shown on the bottom right. Lots of stories about those rotten tape drives! There was a story about someone unofficially up'ping the basic clock speed for the faster system (ie the golden screw driver) by changing a jumper on the master clock. On the right hand side you can see a corner the high speed card reader .. a real innovative piece of technology with "jogging" action and vacuum feeds. it was based on cheque readers, but unfortunately had problems when cards with lots of holes like binary cards - and the BEND card were put thru, the vacuum wasn't strong enough. Its big claim to fame was you could load a complete 2000 card deck in the input hopper. In the front left of the old 40 column Conrac SPO's is the ASR 33 Teletype. This was used to connect to the DSIR's HP2100A Mini computer, a programmer at the DSIR (Robinson?) wrote a Poll/Select comms routine that ran within HP's Time Share Basic to enable tty access to the B6700. You'd type
??LINK and would get logged into CANDE on the B6700.
Brian Boutel (formerly of the Computer Science Department of Victoria University) noted the following:
|
|
