[walford]

"We used them to.Thats a LA36 DECwriter II Terminal.Terminals for state of the art PDP1178's."

I thought it looked familiar. We were running an Intergraph CAD system in 1979 that had a DEC PDP1170 as the CPU [which we called Myrtle]. It had a total of 512K of memory.

There were 8 stations running directly off the mainframe -- there weren't any processors in the original versions. So if 2 or three operators tried to refresh their storage tube displays [there were no raster screens yet], the entire system would lock-up. Re-booting took about 20min.

Thus we were told to holler, "I'm gonna do an update" before refreshing the screen.

[Colosis]

I remember meeting a guy called John Mockley (I think) when I was a kid in the early eighties. He was a married to a first cousin of my mum and he visited our home in Ireland while on some lecture tour. The computer he developed in the 50s was called ENIAC. I remember him showing me pictures of the computer, not so unlike the pic above! Amazing that there are some real submarine pilots who recognize the picture.

[DaveTesla]

We also ran NCR Century 100's. Set the boot address on a
string of hexadecimal rotary switches on the console.
Actually had 20M hard drives. Each one was as big as a
washing machine.
The disk packs looked like 8 layer cakes under big covered
cake dishes.
We would load them in the top of the drive and unlock
and remove the covers and pray the heads didn't crash
when they spun up.