I remember when computers were huge

I am writing right now on my good friend and companion Sony VIO. This is a small laptop that weighs less than one kilogramme. It is rather powerful; I can download and watch films, write and store any number of documents, communicate with anybody in the world writing emails or skyping, perform complicated calculations, read newspapers published anywhere in the world, listen to radio in any language… The list goes on. There are many functions my computer can perform that I even do not know about and I do not want to know more than I already do.  Enough is enough. And I know that my computer is already a couple of years old and that there are more advanced technologies widely available. We take it all for granted now. But the times when I saw a computer the first time in my life it was a totally different computer.

Was it in the late sixties of the last century or the early seventies? I think it was already in the sixties. I just got my seriously sounding diploma of a master of pure mathematics and did not quite know how this was going to serve me in finding an interesting job. I even did not know what would really interest me as a mathematician who did not intend to be a scientist or a school teacher. I had to have a job, though, and the caring communistic government found me one as a corrector of school manuals for math. It was a boring job and definitely did not require any serious qualifications or knowledge of mathematics. Ability to spell correctly was important here. So I read page after page with a red pen in hand marking my corrections in spelling. One of my colleagues realised that I might not be in the right job. Christine, I still remember the name, had an idea. Her brother in law had some strange job with computers and was looking for people who could be trained to be computer programmers. Would I be interested?  I did not know. Would I? I knew what a computer was; they taught me about them computers at uni, but it was a very vague knowledge.

So one evening, the brother in law of Christine, called me and casually asked if I would like to be trained to be a programmer. He could not tell me much about it as he has only started the job himself. Generally speaking, it was to develop systems for distribution of agricultural machines, combine harvesters and such. Just what any twenty-two years old girl is particularly interested in. Hmm… However, I said “yes”. This was a pivotal moment in my life and the start to a serious computer career that lasted decades. I was to become one of the first programmers in Poland, but that memorable evening when my professional life had started I had no idea what was ahead of me.

I had a right aptitude, but no knowledge of computers. A couple of courses filled the gap, and a couple of months later I started to program. It was great fun; they paid me for something that was akin to solving crosswords, one of my hobbies.

These were early days in working with computers, and the first computer I saw was ICL 1900. It took the whole big, air-conditioned room and only special people were allowed to enter this magic place. The data to be processed was stored on punched cards, perforated paper tape and on magnetic tapes that rotated mysteriously in their boxes the size of a grandfather clock. Scary stuff and difficult to comprehend.

 

There were only a few computers in Warsaw at that time and corporations that did not have their own computers had to hire computer time by an hour from the lucky institutions that had their own machines. My employer was not one of the lucky ones and had to hire computer time. That meant that my working hours depended on computer availability. Typically we were allotted time in the middle of night. I must say that I was a brave and determined girl, getting a taxi at 2:00 am to go to work for one hour. During the hour I was supposed to load a new version of my program stored on punched cards, compile it into the form understood by the computer and then execute it by giving the command: GO 20! With some luck, the program worked and produced expected results typically in the form of a business report.

  

This was the best outcome one could expect, but typically the program had further errors that rarely could have been corrected on the spot. So, back to the office and analysing the program, punching corrections on cards like the one on the photo, slotting them into appropriate places and back to booking a new computer time. Disasters of dropping programs and spreading the cards all over the floor were not all that uncommon. Who would dream of working in such a manner these days? But it was great fun.

Today, life is so much easier as far as using computers is concerned. I can produce any report; do my income tax return calculations using a standard program like EXCEL without any need for debugging. It is just there in my PC. My little computer is hundred times more powerful than the huge ones of the sixties and seventies. There is no need to be careful with my data falling on the floor and getting mixed up. But even if I have the computer all to myself I sometimes get up in the middle of the night and sing into work or play.  Occasional insomnia may be a reason for that, but the nightly computer work is still a part of my life