Having a lazy Sunday I got to thinking about the early days of our 'work'! I first started using/programing computers in 1964, those were the days! My first 3 machines (not owned by me but by the Army) were Elliott 803, (this had valves, (tubes for our cousins)), Marconi Myriad and HP 3000 - all of these would be classed as mainframes by today's terminology.

The first 2 had Ferrite Ring Core Stores (todays RAM), each of 4096 words which had to hold ALL the program and data, you programmers of today have it easy, we had to write the tightest software, usually by having the data on punched paper tape as there was no room for it in memory.

The interesting thing about the ferrite ring core store was it had a destructive 'read'. Ones and zeros were represented by the direction that the ring was magnetised, and in order to 'read' it you sent a pulse that changed its state, thereby telling you if it was a zero or one.......this of course meant you had then to restore it to its original state before you could move on.......talk about fast.

When the unit eventually received the HP 3000 my job became a 'doddle' Prior to that I had been keeping and amending data on some 1200 men, Education Standard, Trade Standard, Medical State and lots of others.....all of this data was held on paper tape and when I did an update it meant producing another few hundred feet of paper tape and burning the old stuff....the HP 3000 with its reel to reel mag tape was far more efficient.

I must admit that I did enjoy it though, as a lowly S/Sgt I had evolved the system, sold it to my superiors, maintained it for seven years and as far as I know its successor is still running somewhere in the School of Signals