[Colchester] Computer power struggle

[Wayland Sothcott]

 From the 1960's to the late 1970's computers were big and expensive and 
there fore most operating systems were multi-user even if they were not 
multi-tasking. In mid to large companies there would be a central 
mainframe computer which would have it's own air condition room. Batch 
jobs would be submitted to the computer. At collage in the 1980's we 
actually experienced this batch system by writing a program on punched 
cards. These were then put in an envelope and posted to Chemlsford where 
they were run through the computer. The results printed and posted back.

This was how it was done in the 1960's but most companies would have 
used terminals. These are just a CRT screen that shows text and a 
keyboard. The terminal simulated a teletype, a terminal that was like an 
electric typewriter. The DOS primpt and the Linux shell prompt are 
software examples of these hardware terminals. That's why most commands 
scroll the screen upwards, it's like the roll of paper that the 
teletypes printed on.

The terminals would have been connected to the mainframe using RS232 
cables that run through the building. The cable carrys a transmit wire 
and a recieve wire, one for typing and one for the display. They also 
had handshake lines to allow the mainframe to control the speed that it 
handles input. That way hundreds of terminals could be handled by one 
mainframe.Each terminal taking it's turn when selected by the mainframe.

The thing is, the sysadmins in charge of the mainframe were a power 
centre in the company. They could dictate what was possible and what was 
not possible on the mainframe. If the mainframe were to crash then they 
would be in a lot of trouble since all the important stuff for every 
department was handled on this one machine. Therefore the sysadmins 
tended to be very careful, so they would normally say no to your request 
for something. They also handled all the program coding and there was 
usually a huge backlog.

When the IBM PC and other computers such as the Apple II arrived 
individual departments in a company would bypass the computer department 
and by their own Micro computer. They could then program the application 
they wanted, usually as a spreadsheet but DBase was a very popular 
application.

This took power away from the computer department. They retaliated by 
installing Local Area Networks, LANs, in the building and allowing 
access to the mainframe and file storage. Company policy was then to 
save everything on the serer and the computer department took over 
puchasing of PC's. They also took over the running of the PC's 
eventually locking people out of their PC's by not letting them have the 
administrator login.

The battle to turn the PC back into a terminal continues. In fact some 
companies have what looks like PC's but are just terminals with a 
graphical screens, mouse and keyboard. There is a central server PC 
which runs something like Windows Terminal Services which allows several 
people to use the same PC at the same time. In these companies the 
computer department is full back in control.

That is until someone puts linux on a USB stick and plugs it into the 
terminal, hehehhe. Maybe has hored an old PC and puts linux on it and 
the department has their own server.