Pillowcases and air freshener - the unexpected world of classic computers

On the day of his retirement, Pete Turnbull introduces us to his museum of computing.

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If you walked along the ground floor corridor of the Fairhurst Building last summer, you would have seen a display cabinet reflecting five decades of computing artefacts. The contents came from my collection of 'classic computers'.

5 decades of computing at the University - click for key

Pete and his SGI 2000

My collection is quite small, comprising perhaps 65 machines, whereas my friend Jim has over 600. My smallest and probably cheapest computer is a single-board microcomputer only about 10cm square. The largest and most expensive is a Silicon Graphics Origin 2000, a 'supercomputer' once used by the Dutch weather bureau. It's almost identical to (though half the capacity of) a $1,000,000 system owned by Computer Science in the late 1990s. Luckily I only had to pay for beer when mine was donated. If that makes the CompSci outlay seem a little OTT, understand that the two acquisitions were six years apart.

Why do people collect these things? Well, they aren't all static museum pieces. Most run, and some have practical use in data recovery. There's also a movement to preserve history and heritage. Of course the real reasons for my collection are just nostalgia and entertainment.

Many of the machines have needed repair, restoration or 'improvement', and that's part of the fun. I designed and built the single-board micro mentioned above, loosely based on magazine articles of the day. I recall a trip to Cambridge to collect pre-production Zilog Z8 parts for it in 1984. Cutting edge stuff, 32K memory on a single chip. Fault diagnosis too can be a rewarding intellectual exercise, though ideally away from children easily confused by short 'technical' words.

The PDP-8 - now fresh and clean

Many machines I own came with stories, or the acts of collection did. One PDP-8 had to be treated in the 'circuit board cleaner'. As it was carried out to my car, a small round pink object fell out. "Ah yes," said the donor. "I meant to tell you about that, you'll need it." Apparently Mrs Donor refused to allow the machine in her house because when switched on and warmed up it smelled strongly of cat's pee. The pink object was the optional, somewhat non-standard and fairly ineffectual air freshener upgrade.

A common method of cleaning circuit boards in small production houses is to put them in a domestic dishwasher, so that's what happened. (If you try this, don't use caustic detergent and don't use the hot drying cycle.) Actually I own a number of useful pieces of equipment for computer care, and as several are located in the kitchen, my wife uses them too. For example, our large high temperature paint dryer also produces excellent cakes and roast meats, while the small-parts cleaner and drier can both be used for laundry. Just remember to photograph the keyboard layout before you remove the keycaps and put them in the pillowcase...

Inconceivable amounts of data: a glimpse at our history

In various guises, we've been providing central computing services to the University since 1966 - in 1969, a proposed upgrade which would have seen the purchase of a fourth 4Mb disk drive was rejected, as it was inconceivable that the University would ever generate that amount of data.

These days, we can see more than 8 terabytes of data fly across our wifi network in a single day, we provide email accounts with 30 GB of storage, and the central filestore is supplemented by Google Drive with unlimited storage for native documents.

You might be tempted to believe that reliance on IT facilities is a modern phenomenon, and certainly the current omnipresence of technology is a significant change. But we were providing a campus network, with access to external networked resources, by the end of the 1970s. By the 1980s some students were so reliant on the facilities provided that they turned to direct action when they were thwarted - a student whose programming error put an entire room of computers out of commission was thrown into the lake by his peers. He was suitably contrite, and sent a letter of apology to the Computing Service newsletter of the day, Printout. All things being equal, it's a source of relief that we now have social media to allow us to vent our frustrations in a more controlled manner.

The 1990s saw the arrival of PCs, the launch of the University's web site, and the introduction of IT training suitable for students across all disciplines - not just the sciences. In 2001, there was outrage from some as the University moved from Corel to Microsoft as its main office software. Concerns were raised about cost, and virus susceptibility, and the spellings M$ and Micro$o£t were seriously over-used in some quarters.

By 2009, we were preparing for the University's most significant expansion, with nearly two kilometres of cable used to create a link between Heslington West and the new Heslington East campus. Today, we are working towards pervasive wifi across the campus, and continue to upgrade the various IT facilities we provide. A lot has changed in the last five decades.

To find out more about our history, please visit 50 years of Information: IT or take a stroll past the timeline in the ground floor Fairhurst corridor.

For even more great pictures of monster servers, tiny terminals and startling fashions, browse through our collection of images in the Digital Library:

• IT Services photographs