I was searching for some photographs to put up on my photo blog when I came across a couple of pictures that I took in my office a the Lawrence Berkeley Lab computer center (room 1127/50A) in February, 1975. I have an earlier photo of me in my office from 1971 in a blog post I did a while back, and it's interesting to compare the difference.

First, note the CRT terminal. No, this is not a computer. It's a video equivalent of the teletypewriter, connected by a fairly slow line to the CDC 6400/6600/7600 complex down the hall in building 50B. I was one of the first people in the LBL computer center to do away with punched cards and work exclusively interactively. Also note the microfiche reader next to it. At this time LBL produced most of its output on microfiche. I was maintaining all the compilers and libraries on the CDC system, which of course meant lots of big code listings. You can see them on the shelf in the previous image from 1971. On the wall the calendar would seem to indicate that it was the last week of February 1975. Some of the pictures on the wall you may find on my photo blog now (this one, and this one). And two portaits of my wife at the time, Anita. On the far right is part of a brochure from Davos, Switzerland, where we were the previous year. The framed print was a gift from local artist Carol Law. I still have it somewhere.

On the bookshelf I can see the Webster's Collegiate dictionary that I still have in my office at Sun. Note the rotary phone. Next to it on the desk is a stack of CDC manuals (the red front page indicates update pages)

Here's a closeup of what's on the screen:

What's being displayed is some job control language for the BKY system, a homegrown version of CDC's own Chippewa OS that ran as a front-end to the 7600 back-end. Looks like the JCL is compiling a listing of the CDC FORTRAN 77 compiler FTN, and staging the listing to the microfiche writer.  You can see that even in 1975 I was using RCHRD as my job login name. The history of RCHRD is in an earlier post. 

Note there's no "scroll bar" on the display, and it's all UPPER CASE. It was primitive, but quite a change from 1971 when everything was done on cards. COPYPSS  was an intermediate storage device where you could store data or output for later retrieval. Remember, this was a few years before UNIX, and there was no central permanent data store on the computer itself... data had to be staged into and out from the program running on the 7600 to external mass storage devices, like tape.

Never thought I'd become nostalgic about that old ADM display. I can almost recall the bakelite smell when it got hot.