A History of UW Central Computing: The Cyber Era

Summary

UWIT About UW IT History The Cyber Era Almost immediately, the new director made several changes. One of the more significant was the re-structuring of the two assistant director positions into a single position. With the result that neither of the assistant directors was qualified for the new position! Also, all "supervisors" were turned into "managers". Getting used to a new director, and vice-versa, can be a trying experience. In this case we saw an extreme example when the Sigma suffered a hardware failure shortly after the new director arrived. It took unusually long to repair, and when one of the engineers decided being in all night was enough, he decided to go home to get some sleep (while other engineers continued diagnostic efforts). The director indicated this was not acceptable, and after a few more words, the engineer quit on the spot. The new director started a lengthy and complex project to define computing requirements, issue and evaluate an RFP, and select a "winner". One of the requirements was two separate systems for redundancy, with identical instruction sets for compatibility. One system was to be "slow and small," relatively speaking, and the other "fast and big". This would allow large-scale computing, without spending the money for two expensive systems. Several million dollars (6?) was made available by the state legislature. Eventually, around mid-1978, the decision was made to purchase a Cyber 730 and a Cyber 760 from Control Data Corporation (actually the bid was for a model 173 and 175 respectively, but CDC changed the model numbers between bid and delivery). Wikipedia has an entry for Control Data Corporation . CDC was one of the earliest pioneers of computer-aided instruction systems, called PLATO, which also has a Wikipedia entry. Some folks are working to preserve operable PLATO systems, see http://cyber1.org which involves running NOS on top of a Cyber emulator (courtesy of Tom Hunter, below). A PLATO history blog is here. UW was no...