Re: Early Computers (was Market pressures for more reliable software)

[robin <robin_v@bigpond.nospam.com>]

"Gary Labowitz" <garyl@enter.net> writes: 
> Most shops in the early days were
> centralized computing. And most of those were centralized development as
> well. [Definition: centralized -- a single computer at a centralized
> location. All computing is done on that computer. Users go physically to
> that computer site and either submit jobs directly to the machine, being
> given time on the machine to use it, or submit jobs to a checkpoint from
> which operators submit the jobs for the user. If the site was large enough
> to have several computers they were clustered in the same general area and
> users selected which of the computers would be used for their individual
> jobs.]

Multiple computers were not always situated in the one place,
although some sites that had *identical* systems
had them together for backup and maintenance purposes.

> I can remember back to 1962 (when I started with IBM) but built my first
> computer in 1956.

And what was that?

> Your turn.
> Gary