1980s

In the late 80s¹ the University of Arizona had a satellite link to the John von Neumann Center for our internet connectivity. The link itself was a 57Kbit satellite connection using that giant roof mounted antenna on top of the computer center.

One morning the VitaLink Corp Satellite NOC called us to see if we had lost power as they had lost signal from us.

Back in 1986 the University registration process was based on stacks of punch cards. Each punch card was a seat in a class. You gather a card for each class and turn them in to registration under your name…

Just in case someone needs to know what the value of decimal (75) is in Hexadecimal (4B) or Binary (0100 1011).

This was something you needed to know to manage the IDX-3000 x.25 Packet switch. 3000 was the number of Async. ports a single IDX processor could support. Later IDX created a way to link two IDX-3000 processors together.

We used the IDX-3000 to distribute Asynchronous based terminals across the campus. This was parallel to the Engineering Sytek and replacing the Computer Center PAC-X packet switch.

How about the IBM 3270 “dumb” terminal key labels.

Here’s another chapter of ADP-CCIT-UITS

We went thru a IBM “Big Iron” phase.

Here’s a 3274 controller configuration card used to program the remote “multiplexers”.

Part of the IBM SNA 3270 distributed communications architecture.

They had both channel and T1 attached device controllers.

The UA was the first user of the IBM 7171 Async. Controller west of the Mississippi.

A few people have mentioned CoSy which was an early “computer conferencing / communication system” implemented by CCIT (now UITS) back in 1987. It later branched out into Instructional CoSy which was used by students and their professors for communication. I found a scan of an old white paper on the first phase of the CoSy project that Roger Caldwell, Mely Tynan, Bob Leach, and I put together. It’s got miscellaneous references to history / environment back in those days (30 years ago!

What’s the significance of a red punch card in a run deck?

Hint: It has nothing to World of Warcraft…

It’s a job card, the first card in the deck to be read by the punch card reader.

Images of the UANet from 1987