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Arriving at Cal, William Jolitz was surprised to find Cal Computer Services pushed most student work from many different departments through a cranky CDC 6400 in the basement of Evans Hall for batch mode processing (Pascal). Even the cardpunch was a decade older machines (026's with BCD) - many of the cards required manual "multipunch" like 6-7-8-9 to signal "end-of-file". The first minicomputers were being phased in with the Math-Stat Computer Science PDP 11/45 on the 4th floor of Evans Hall, which ran UNIX part of the time and BASIC the rest of the time. |
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The 2.8BSD kernel was originally work done for the Cory Hall PDP 11/70, and release engineered on the PDP 11/40 in Stanley Hall (since rebuilt completely). The Stanley Hall PDP 11/40 was in the middle of a lab for molecular research ("regulation in ATCase") - William once had to clean by hand all hundred corroded edge connectors with an ink eraser so it would correctly run the toggled-in diagnostics of "1: cmp #0,#0 ; je 1b; halt" for hours instead of stopping in seconds. |
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