Ed Finnell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Next thing you know they'll be giving discounts to .edu's?
Until a consent decree made them keep their distance, IBM did lots of university work, including discounts, donations and collaborative research. I have been told that most of the folks at the Cambridge Scientific Center who were asked, post-decree, to transfer to Yorktown Heights ended up at Route 128 minicomputer companies. When I arrived at WPI in 1977, the data center (WACCC) had an old PDP-10 (just like the one I'd used in high school) and a brand new Univac 9060 (a RCA Spectra-family OEM mainframe), complete with keypunches, batch queues and printers. Since I'd had a green card for close to ten years (my sister had scribbled crayon all over it), even use of an OEM mainframe via keypunch (as if it were 1967, not 1977), was awesome. A few weeks into the BAL course, I was sent home, told to finish my programs and collect my A. Even though data processing for WPI and other area schools was WACCC's raison d'etre and the old and slow PDP-10 could not handle student computing alone, most of WACCC's staff was virulently anti-mainframe. Because student batch jobs used Waterloo's student interpreters, I went into the head administrator's office to discuss Waterloo's terminal and floppy based data entry and spooling solution... they'd dumped their keypunches and drastically cut supply usage... and was told off because it used an IBM minicomputer (a Series/1 from GSD). He was probably looking forward to the end of student mainframe use (which came in the fall of 1980). -- John R. Grout [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
