IP: LECTURE: "The Computing Environment at Livermore in the 1970's"

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

                Bay Area Computer History Perspectives
                                 and
                  The Computer Museum History Center
                               present


         "The Computing Environment at Livermore in the 1970's"




          with Jed Donnelly, John Fletcher, and Dick Watson
               Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory




                       5:30 PM, Thursday, Jan. 29
                             Caspian Room
                           Sun Microsystems
                         901 San Antonio Road
                               Palo Alto
                          (directions at end)




Back 35 years ago, if you took delivery of a new supercomputer by
Seymour Cray (like the CDC 6600) you got a box with boards and wires
and you had to write an operating system yourself, since you did not get
one with the machine.


If you wanted a comprehensive network environment delivering a wide
range of services to an entire community of users, you had to do that
job yourself too. You had to build the network hardware, write the
network software, and integrate it all with your own custom operating
system on a wide variety of machines from minicomputers to supercomputers.


The result was a complete computing environment built and tailored to
serve the needs of a particular group of users. Such an environment
existed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the 1970's. It wasn't
possible in the 1960's, and it had already become obsolete in the
1980's, with the arrival of generic network hardware and software.


The 1970's may have been the only time in the history of computing that
such an entire custom dedicated environment was possible or practical.
And it had advantages: for example, you could at any time interrupt a
long job taking hours or days, store the complete process to disk, and
start it up again at that exact point, on the same machine or another
machine, whenever you wanted (just try doing that today).


Dick Watson will begin the program with an overview of the period. John
Fletcher will take us back to the earliest times, since he came to
Livermore first. And Jed Donnelly will discuss operating system
developments with the network extensions.


------------------------------------------------------------------------


The staff of Bay Area Computer History Perspectives and The Computer
Museum History Center wish to thank George Michael for his assistance
with this program. George arrived at Livermore within a week of the
delivery of the first computer there, back in 1953. He has been
contributing to the development of computer technology at Livermore,
and to recording and preserving the history of that technology, ever
since. We thank him for his work for computer history.


These talks are sponsored by The Computer Museum History Center and Sun
Microsystems.


------------------------------------------------------------------------




                             Directions


Southbound on 101 in Palo Alto: take San Antonio Road South exit, then
immediately exit on first driveway on right side of the road into Sun
parking lot.


Northbound on 101 in Palo Alto: take San Antonio Road exit. Turn left
at the stop sign and drive back over the freeway, then exit on first
driveway on right side of the road into Sun parking lot.


Once in the Sun parking lot: enter through portico at far end of
building, the entrance with the Network dog house beside the door. The
Caspian Room is off the lobby on the left side.



--
Dag Spicer
Manager, Historical Collections
The Computer Museum History Center
Moffett Federal Airfield
Mountain View, CA  94035


Offices: Building T12-A
Exhibit Area: Building 126


Tel: +1 650 604 2578
Fax: +1 650 604 2594
E-m: spicer () tcm org
WWW: http://www.tcm.org/history/


<spicer () tcm org>  PGP: 15E31235 (E6ECDF74 349D1667 260759AD 7D04C178)