WVNET Before the Creation

1969

September 1969

WVUCC installed an IBM 360/75 computer with 512 Kilobytes of main storage, 1 Megabyte of low speed memory, two 2303 drums, a bank of 2314 "Direct Access Storage Devices" (DASD) consisting of eight mountable drives with 22 Megabytes per drive, three 2400 tape drives (one 7-track drive and two 9-track drives), two 1403 printers, and a 2540 card reader/punch. The operating system was MVT with the HASP spooling software. This was mostly a batch operating environment. The only interactive processing was with an IBM product called "Conversational Programming System" (CPS). CPS ran in three modes: a PL/I mode, a Basic mode, and an RJE (Remote Job Entry) mode.

November 1969

It took 3 months for the systems staff to install and test the hardware and software on the 360/75. Finally the new beast was made available to the users. The two "old" IBM 1130 computers at WVU's Stewart Hall and in Engineering began running remote job entry during certain hours of the day. At first there was a very limited number of terminals available to users for accessing CPS.

December 1970

A second bank of 2314 DASD was installed. A major portion of this 2314 subsystem was reserved for a large data base, but two of the drives were available to support regular batch processing and conversational programming.

July 1971

As the WVUCC systems staff gained experience with the MVT operating system, it became clear that the operating system contained some major bottlenecks that degraded performance. Addison Fischer, a WVUCC systems programmer, began to explore better job scheduling techniques. Addison wrote a new job scheduler and christened it the Executor. The Executor was added to MVT, increasing performance on this operating system by approximately 50%. The Executor was later marketed all over the world.

January 1972

The staff at WVUCC had begun a search for interactive software products that would fit the computer center's limited budget. York APL was installed on the 360/75 and became the first version of APL ("A Programming Language") available to the WVUCC user community. This particular version of APL was written at York University. APL was a fairly new language, different in design from anything that had existed before.

April 1972

NIH Wylbur was made available to WVUCC users. Wylbur, a powerful text-editing language with RJE capabilities, was originally written at Stanford University; NIH Wylbur was a spinoff of the Stanford package, developed by the National Institute of Health. Wylbur was the first significant interactive software run at WVUCC, providing remote job entry capabilities that were a vast improvement over CPS/RJE. After the user community had the opportunity to get adjusted to Wylbur, the RJE and BASIC modes of CPS were removed from the system. CPS/BASIC was unreliable and had been hard to support.

November 1972

All communication lines used by WVUCC had previously been controlled by IBM 2701 and 2702 hardware devices. These devices were now replaced with a new IBM 3705 communications controller, a computer that ran its own operating system and emulated multiple 2701 and 2702 controllers. By installing the 3705, WVUCC increased its communication capacity and saved money. This was the computer center's first step in the direction of sophisticated communication devices.

July 1973

An IBM 1130 computer at Fairmont State College was linked to the WVUCC 360/75. This allowed users at Fairmont State to run batch jobs on the 360/75. This was the first access to WVUCC's computer resources by another institution of higher learning. A non-WVU communication link was now in place and the first step was taken in the direction of a Network.

September 1973

At a time of limited money to support computer upgrades, WVUCC was always on the lookout for any bargain/free software or hardware. WVUCC heard that the Internal Revenue Service was getting rid of some IBM tape drives. A deal was struck and six IBM 7340 tape drives were installed at WVUCC. These were obtained at no cost from the IRS, and WVUCC became one of only three installations in the world to use 7340 hypertapes. The hypertapes were primarily used for DASD backups and scratch tapes. Local modifications were made to the tape drives to improve their usefulness as scratch tape devices.

Heavy Metal Constructed a bit like a giant cassette tape, this IBM 7340 "hypertape" cartridge once served as a "scratch" tape for WVUCC and later for WVNET.

Summer 1974

WVUCC began to study means for improving performance on the 360/75. This led to the purchase on the "used market" of an additional 512K of high speed memory for the 360/75 and the hardware needed to upgrade the 360/75 from a model I to a model J.