Computing Center’s Early Days

Re the Dec. 6 From the Archives photo: Back in the early 1960s, there was great excitement when the EQuad got a new IBM System 360 (they put a sign on it that referred to it being “très sexy”). As a politics major, I got access to the IBM 7094 by doing some fairly interesting multi-dimensional scaling from Professor Harold Schroeder in the psychology department, who was studying the structure of (political, among other) decision-making. I remember carting an entire 2,000-card box in the front basket of my bicycle from Blair Hall across the campus in the cold winter, hoping the data would load and the program compile. When we finally got things ready to go, we had to run it “overnight” because it required four hours to produce a carton and a half of data. Great stuff, of course, but substantially different than a K&E slide rule.