History
In January 1957 Dr Ewan Page was appointed as the Director of the Durham University Computing Laboratory at King's College Newcastle. In November of the same year the Computing Laboratory took possession of a Ferranti Pegasus computer. Towards the end of the 1957/8 academic year the first undergraduate courses offered in a British University were started to teach programming. We began by offering a Numerical Analysis course as part of the final year of an Honours degree in Mathematics. Then the Postgraduate Diploma in Numerical Analysis and Automatic Computing was offered from October 1959. |
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1963 saw the replacement of the Pegasus by the KDF9. The emerging subject of computing science was added to mathematics as part of the General Degree with Honours. The first single Honours Degree began in 1967 with six students. The following year, the number of places was increased to admit 18 students selected from 549 applicants. They were required to take the first year mathematics course along with two other courses chosen from those available in the Faculty of Science. |
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| The KDF9 was replaced by the IBM360 in 1969. The arrival of the first multiple access computer outside North America and the planning for it brought a marked change. We became much bigger on the service side and several of the new people naturally soon joined the research community, attending and contributing to the Colloquia and registering for research degrees. There was more interest in the analysis of computing systems and processes giving rise to research by staff and students. |  |
| In 1975, the IBM360 was upgraded to an IBM370. Students and researchers were able to write their computer programs onto punched cards using special machines located around the campus. The sets of cards were deposited at a batch station on the ground floor of Claremont Tower and loaded into the computer to run overnight. The output of the program was returned the next morning along with the punched cards. This 24 hour turn-around time certainly focussed the mind on producing well-written programs. |  |
The last mainframe computer to be used at Newcastle was installed in 1985, The Amdahl 5860 had a main processing unit the size of a row of filing cabinets, 40 Mb of main memory and weighed 17 tonnes! By then, programmers were able connect directly to the computer through simple terminals and could communicate with other universities over the Joint Academic Network (JANET). The same year saw the deployment of our first network of standalone computers. Each Xerox workstation had a graphical display and a mouse! |
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More details of this history can be found in "Forty Years On: An Anniversary Volume", published in 1997.