• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Vintage Amateur Computer Club magazines now on-line

I love to see this kind of thing happening. It's great for preserving history. Keep at it!

Can you tell us a bit more about the Amateur Computer Club? From the look at it a London-based computer club, yes?

Tez
 
It was really a National Magazine based club, but any meetings as such initially took place in London, or in the Thames Valley (Swindon, Newbury). If you look in the first magazine you will see my plea for any one in the North West to contact me for a meeting. Just to see the context of the rime, note that at that time we didn't even have a phone in the student house I lived in. This was the age of the Mainframe. I was actually suffering from computer deprivation. You can see from:-

http://history.cs.ncl.ac.uk/anniversaries/40th/webbook/photos/index.html

this was the year Newcastle University received its new S370. I had learnt to program some three years earlier in machine code and then Fortran II while still at school. We posted our cards off and got the output back a few days later, but no limits on what I put on the cards. Then I went to Newcastle Polytechnic where I had an account on the 360/67 in the photos above. Usually I popped my cards in a pigeon hole and they were fed into an IBM1130 which sent them down the line to the 360/67 but you could book terminal time on an ancient IBM2741. Later I wrote some APL. However at this time I was doing my "Industrial Placement" in the Actuarial Department at Refuge Assurance in Manchester, with no access to a computer. Most calculations were performed on a mechanical "wind the handle" calculator.

I got no reply from that note, but two years later I started the Manchester Computer Club along with several other folks from the ACC but I don't think we ever produced a magazine....
 
Thanks for these Dave. They give a welcome British perspective of the emerging home / enthusiast computer scene.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top