[ih] Historical fiction

[craig at aland.bbn.com (Craig Partridge)]

> On 5/11/2012 11:34 AM, Randy Bush wrote:
>  > ucla had two /91s, the second being carol newton's in biomath, which i
>  > used.  but i do not remember that it was connected, other than
>  > bisync/rjs to city of hope and other LA area institutions in the late
>  > '60s.
> 
> 
> It wasn't, at least through the mid-70s.  I was an operator on that 
> machine until I started at the UCLA Arpanet project.
> 
> The Health Sciences 360/91 had less memory but better-trained staff than 
> the main campus computer.  As I understood it then, it was the 
> pre-eminent NIH-funded machine in the nation.

Hi Dave:

This is an interesting side note that may be of interest to Sytel in
writing fiction.

In the 1970s and 1980s, many leading universities had multiple computer
centers run by different departments/agencies (for instance, Harvard had
at least four around 1980).   In many cases this was a response to an
administrative unit (department, school) being unable to get the computing
resources from the main computing facility.

In most case I learned of, the relationship was one of cheerful competion
between the centers on the same campus, except when every few years the
main computing guys would attempt a takeover and get beaten back.

Later this split would show up in the CSNET/BITNET split (CSNET = computer
science dept, BITNET = main campus computing facility).

Thanks!

Craig