Back in the days when people had big glasses, no ears, and mainframe computers, less powerful than my 2022 phone, occupied entire floors. That’s a whopping 1,200 megabytes of disk storage behind me. If I remember correctly, the ICL 2960 computer had 128kb of memory. The ICL 2904 in the foreground was much smaller.

We supported over 200 dumb terminals and could cope with around 30 plus concurrent users. Overnight, we ran various student programs, administrative and research projects.

Left to right: Gary, Chris, and Alex. Chris was a ‘Punch Operator’ — we still used punched cards for input back then — acting as a model computer operator for the picture.

My best guess is that this picture was taken between 1982 and 1983. I found it in an old Computer Science Department brochure I’d kept.

I worked at the Polytechnic in several roles from 1974 to 1984 (Computer Operator, Programmer, and Supervisor).