Charlottesville Computer Room, 1967

The Charlottesville computer room in 1967. Standing is Sandy Braun, and at the console is Mary Jennings, an IBM employee. There were computer operators on duty 24/7, and tapes of data taken in Green Bank, at the 140ft, the 300ft, and the interferometer, came over daily on the shuttle to be processed in Charlottesville. Processing programs were handwritten on paper and transferred to cards using a keypunch, then read into the computer from decks of punched cards to process the data from the tapes. [Note the punched cards in Sandy's hand and in the box just to her right.] The output, often spectral data from our autocorrelators, was hundreds of pages of numbers which had to be assessed by eye for quality control. The trick was to get the stacks of paper back to Green Bank in time for the observers to change their observing program to take the new data into consideration. To Mary's right is the console. The system was controlled from it - the operating system or diagnostics were loaded by selecting various switch options. Mary is at the main terminal with a "standard" setup for those days: a teletype keyboard with printer output. Operating system directives were entered here by the computer operator, since this was prior to the days of video terminals (aka Cathode Ray Terminals or CRTs) with associated keyboards. The computer is an IBM 360 series, and the operating system was known as OS/360; programs were probably written in PL/1 or Fortran.

Records of the NRAO

Still Image

GB67-03601.jpg

B&W negative

1967-03-08

NRAO/AUI/NSF

GB67-03601

1967-03-08

Photographs Series

Electronics, Computers and Equipment Unit

2A