10 Dec
2008
10 Dec
'08
1:57 p.m.
Roger Holmes wrote:
Here is an
aspect of computer history not yet touched - when did the
industry standardize on the 2 x 2 raised floor? Certainly they were
common in the 1960s, but were they standard in the 1950s?
An interesting question. I would have said they were common in the
late 60s but not in the early 60s. None of the 1301s (built 1962-65)
I have seen were on raised floors, maybe because 700 square feet of
raised flooring would have been expensive, but I suppose not compared
to 247,000 pounds for the computer itself. When I first started
programming them in 1969, I think all the ones I visited were on
raised floors, had 'tacky mats' and air conditioning, which often
blew out of the floor. On the other hand, when I went to work for a
company which made computers (in 1974) and which used them
extensively for software development, there were no raised floors, no
tacky mats and only one of the computer rooms had air conditioning
because it was the only one to used exchangeable hard disks, the rest
used paper tape or cartridge mag tape or one inch analogue tape for
audio data which was used as test input to sonar processing computers.
Just my experience, maybe not typical, and in the UK.