“Oh no, Grandpa Has Another Story“
from the collection
In September 1970 I began my career in computers and my career at SaskTel.
I had graduated from the U of S, Regina Campus (now known as U of R) the previous May. In the absence of any job offers, I worked that summer as a farm hand. When September arrived, I still had no job offers so I registered in the Education Faculty and attended classes for 1½ days before I received the SaskTel offer.
I started my I.T. as a computer operator for SaskTel’s IBM 360-30 with TOS! For you computer geeks, TOS stood for Tape Operating System – it didn’t even have a disk drive! For you non-geeks, if you are reading this on-line you have in your hand, or at your fingertips, a computer that is far more powerful than that was!
In the picture above, I am sitting at the console – a keyboard that is probably the only component still existing in the computers of 2017. I am looking towards the CPU. Under my feet is a raised floor to allow for air conditioning to cool all of the components.
Behind me you can see one of the tape drive units, there were five altogether. The tape reels had 2400 feet of tape and the vacuum columns to allow the tape to move smoothly across the read-write heads. The tape drive that is visible (which is on the left of the bank of five) was the one with the system software. The one at the other end of the five had the application software (the apps, as they are called these days) and in the middle were three data drives.
Not in the picture is the card reader/punch. But I have included a picture of a punch card. The punch cards would be in trays with a capacity of 3000 cards. It was a source of pride for us computer operator types to be able to lift all 3000 out of the tray, at the same time, and set them in the hopper of the reader – without them fanning all over the floor!
Also not in the picture is a high speed printer with print characters spinning on a high speed chain. That printer could create 100’s of pages per minute of fanfold printout.
All of this equipment created a great deal of noise, particularly if the hoods were open. One of the greatest frights I ever experienced was one day at 2 AM when everything was running, and open, and there was a power failure. Instantly my world became pitch black and dead quiet! I slowly backed up, sat down on the chair and concentrated at getting my heart rate down while awaiting the emergency lighting to come on 20 seconds later.
One other vignette. Sometimes I would bring Beverly Boyle in with me and we would do rolling chair races around this million dollars’ worth of equipment!!
In 2025 a version of this story was published on the Historic Saskatchewan facebook page:
Visible in my shirt pocket is a blank 80-column computer punch card. I was probably using this one as a notepad. However, punch cards were a fundamental media for computers of the day. Just outside the photo, to my left, Is a large card reader/punch unit. The card reader had an input capacity of 3000 cards — which we computer operators would lift freehand from trays and drop into the hopper. One source of cards — with data punched in — was the long distance (LD) toll operators who would mark the start and end time of each call onto the card. The card was then sent through an optical mark reader (OMR) which would then punch the call info onto the card. Another source of the cards was the computer programmers who would write “lines of code” onto coding sheets and submit them to the keypunch department. In SaskTel the keypunch department was located in a room adjacent to the computer room on the other side of full glass partitions. This room was also to my left on the other side of the card reader/punch. I clearly remember the supervisor of the keypunch pool and her favourite saying: “In a pidgeon’s crotch!”
Straight ahead from where I am sitting was the 1403 High Speed Fanfold printer. It was an impact printer that featured a continuosly flying print chain. Among many items this printer would print the customer phone bills detailing the destination and time of every toll call.
Click to read the entire “Oh No Grandpa Has Another Story” Gallery!
Verse for today:
“But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and the more they spread abroad.”
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