Slaves, in reverent fear of God submit yourselves to your masters, not only to those who are good and considerate,but also to those who are harsh.
1 Peter 2:18 (NIV)
One of the things that surprised me about university life was the nature and role of the Student Union. It was simply the case that it hadn’t really occurred to me that the students would be allowed to have so much control over their own lives. At school, every aspect of life on the campus was closely controlled by the school staff. This was for good reason, the school was full of school children who needed discipline and focus. I should have realised that a system designed for adults (even young ones) needed to be different and so the University is a symbiotic relationship between the University authorities, responsible for the academic stuff and the Union, responsible for organising the students’ social activities, bars, clubs, sports etc.
To give some background. At the time, the country was in a period of political turmoil. The latter part of the 1970s was characterised by the combination of ever soaring inflation (we think we’ve got problems today in 2023, that’s nothing compared with the ’70s), economic downturn, escalating unemployment and a political war between government and trade unions. The former Labour government had been blighted by the ‘Winter of Discontent” orchestrated by the public sector trade unions. This had culminated with the election of the conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher in the May of 1979, just before I went to Bradford. The University of Bradford Union (UBU) on the other hand was dominated by left wing politics informed by a belief that the Thatcher Government was a temporary aberration and would soon be replaced by a good socialist Labour government. Much of the energy of the Union’s leadership was trying to put the world to rights motivated by an extreme left-wing agenda. Meanwhile, the general student population was happy so long as the beer was cheap enough in the Union bars and that sufficiently big names turned up at the gigs organised by the Union’s Entertainments Director.
The Student population of the University was about 4,000 which is about a quarter of what it is today. Back then, University was for the few and as the population was incredibly white, with the exception of a minority of fee-paying foreign students mostly, as I recall, from the far east. A quick look at the UBU web site of today (2023) and you see almost predominantly Asian faces, in keeping with the local ethnic mix of Bradford. The University is a very different place to the one I went to, mostly in a good way I think.
Don’t get me wrong, the services we got from the Union were fine but obviously of the time. I joined the ski club and through that, got a cheap one-week ski-ing trip to La Plagne in France which was hosting the UK Universities championship. The University ski club had a load of kit including skis and boots which helped toward cost cutting. The club also organised lessons at a dry slope in Harrogate.
The Other university club I got involved with was the Computer Society and I ended up playing a big part for the club magazine called Abacus. This had a collection of articles for anyone with an interest in computing (whether or not they were studying computer science although I think all probably were). I still have got an old copy of Abacus and it is amazing to read how preoccupied we were at trying to cost-effectively produce and duplicate a 20-page document. We had to spend a long evening in the computer centre laboriously printing the pages using a dot-matrix printer and producing the cover on a flat-bed plotter. The quality of the resulting document by today’s standard is quite limited but at the time, it was something to be proud of and it was at the cutting edge of using computer power in publishing.
This was before the era of widespread word processing. The software we used (running on UNIX) was “nroff” standing for “New Runoff” where you had to insert into your text, certain special codes so that when it got to the printer, it was nicely formatted. For or example, to make some text bold, rather than simply being able to select some text and clicking the “B” icon, you needed to put the characters “.ft B” in the line before. To the untrained reader this would look like gobbledygook and was nothing like the “what you see is what you get” word processing editors of today. Curiously though, I just opened up a terminal window on my Mac (the OS of which is built on UNIX) and what do you know, “nroff” is still there after more than 40 years. You can get instructions on how to do the nroff markup on the internet so if you are really bored, you find out what it was like to write a paper using this language in 1980! We also used this to print our coursework and dissertations.
One of the most memorable activities of the Computer Society during my time at Bradford was the attempted rescue of a very early computer from the scrapheap.
It was all started by one of our more exciting teachers, Dr Emmanuel Yannakoudakis, who as well as teaching us about databases, had (has) a passion for the history of computing. Dr Yannakoudakis, who insisted on being called “Manny”, had discovered an old computer (early 1960s era) by Compagnie des Machines Bull (now known simply as Bull) called a GAMMA 10. This computer was owned and had presumably been operated by an independent school in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire. The school wanted shot of it and Manny had a vision to start a museum of computing at the University.
He enlisted the help of the University Computer Society to arrange transport of the machine to Bradford whereupon we could somehow find a space for it on campus. So we set off in convoy with a rented van and Manny’s Triumph TR7 sports car (quite a combination) on the 170 mile trip from Bradford to Berkhamsted. When we got there, we got rather a nasty surprise because the computer and all its associated paraphernalia was a beast and represented tons of heavy equipment. There was absolutely no chance that our transport would even come close to carrying the computer anywhere, so we settled for what we could carry in our transit van (which wasn’t a lot in the scheme of things). We (I) ended up having to grovel to the student union for a couple of hundred quid to get a haulage firm to transport the beast up to Bradford. I got help from a very unexpected quarter when Reg Bull (name a coincidence) former president of the Union and one of the left-wing activists I was so unkind to earlier, put his weight behind the proposal. I think Reg was able to see the “bigger picture” and it was worthwhile in itself to try and preserve history for future generations. So eventually a large truck turned up on campus and unloaded the rest of the old French computer.
The GAMMA 10 was a very early business computer. Its sole means of inputting data was through a punched card reader and the two output devices were a line printer and card punch. Since the computer didn’t have any way of storing information such as disk or tape, anything which needed to be stored for future use would have to be output on punched cards . These would have needed to be filed away by an operator and then fed in again when needed. The 1KB of internal Random-Access Memory used a technology known as magnetic core storage. Each bit of information is stored in a tiny ring made of a ferrous material which could be magnetised to represent a 1 or a 0. Years after magnetic cores were obsolete, RAM was often referred to as “core”, not because it was core to the operation of the processor but because of its predecessor technology.
Because it was predominantly an “industrial” electromechanical device, capable of punching 300 cards per minute, it weighed a ton (literally, explaining why we needed a truck and crane to transport it). If you think the magnetic core memory is crude, remember that this was the pre silicon chip age and the CPU had over 4,000 separate transistors spread over 575 printed circuit boards. Compare this to a modern CPU chip containing several billion transistors on a postage stamp sized piece of silicon.
Reflecting on the GAMMA 10, it is easy to see what a game changer it must have been to a business using it. It would process 300 cards per minute, each card representing a transaction which would have taken a skilled admin clerk many minutes to execute. The processing would have been more accurate too and the business would have been able to create reports on data that would simply not have been possible manually.
The story of this particular GAMMA 10 has rather a sad ending in that eventually, it was not possible to find a home for it at the University and it had to be scrapped after all. Fortunately, there is still a working GAMMA 10 at the “technikum 29 Living Musium” in Frankfurt, Germany.
Richard Mann 