I saw the machine cycle !




In my previous post I wrote-up the list of the main points that indicate my participatory observation to the Networking phenomenon. In the present one I will try to trace my knowledge path, somewhat abstracted over full details. I will focus on main ideas and concepts constructed in my domain with a little help of my friends in knowledge acquisition.

First step, was electronics one night my old man Panagiotis talked about Sputnik in sovietland. We were both gazing into the dark-blue sky, resting on a bed out in the garden in summer time, no air condition then and no burglars. Walls were releasing the stored heat from the day's radiating sun. Rockets in Space, huge electricity generators in Nile as imprints into my mind. I was keen on electricity while at school, it must have been also the simple experiments from an amateur's magazine I guess that related me to electronics to become a study goal later.

So I entered for Essex Computer Science, after GCE's at Hastings College for Further Education following my schooling in Athens and the army still in Gov. Computer Science, Mathematics and Electronics the major subjects.

My colleagues had ample practical experience with electronic components, hacking old computers by hobby. Another colleague was experimenting with a synthesizer. Unfortunately, lacking lab experience, I interpreted the hobby as a prerequisite for the university course so I dropped electronics since computer science was "higher level" digital domain.

One of the most important concepts I grasped was the real live picture shown on the oscilloscope's green screen: The main clock pulse, the other small pulses generated driving the gate components on the mother board, the sequencing of actions between registers that shifted bits around. The exercise was to tune the board's devices so that all pulses were time cascaded under the one big cycle, the machine cycle.

It was the lab and course designed by Prof. Tony Brooker at Essex University in 1974 who delivered the lectures. My tutor, was Ian MacCallum, he ran the 16-Micro-V microcomputer programming course emulated on the DEC TOPS-10. Small programs where entered manually by flipping the switches of the box but bigger ones were prepared on punched cards and entered on the DEC Mainframe as a deck of cards.

Before that was connecting the basic components: transistor flip-flops, NAND gates, adders, registers, wired-up ferrite-core rings magnetized, LED panel.

Actually, day one in the lab we played with a paper computer, a wooden structure, an overturned cupboard laid upon a table. The small nests containing paper cards. Each card had instructions to the student executor: put this card into the nest labeled program-counter. A manually operating computer !

I was quite familiar with manual procedure as I did the the numerical analysis lab at Hasting College the year before. There we played with iterative methods on old style calculators with handles.There I learnt BASIC using a teletype to log into a US Mainframe.

It was a fascinating course at Essex Computer Science Department at the School of Mathematics. Jim Brady, Andrew Lister, Pat Hayes, Richard Bornat were running an incredible show.

But it was the Maths department that won me over since Brooker and others were against our student Union occupation adventure, too right wing for my taste. Those days, Maggie Thatcher came to campus to see the reds and Keith Joseph. I was more attracted by the political electricity of our president, on a wheel chair with speech disorder. Essex radiated electricity similar to the sound produced by Sex Pistols in concert below Square 4.

In fact, the real reason I did not follow Computing was my failure at ALGOL-60. Richard Bornat did not believe that the messy program-deck I submitted was due to the spitting of the card-reader not the result of my ignorance that WRITE (X) comes after READ (X). It is funny, recently I read on the web that he received a suspension from teaching due to mis-behaviour to a student! some people never change !.

Mr. Corovesis you are my worst student, you have not learnt a thing from the course and your assignment work (backtracked horse moves on chess-board) proves it. I did my best to explain: had to be in St. Albans for the week-end, did not keep a printout, program was OK but I had to put back the cards in order (after the spitting by the Card-reader device) without looking at the printout !! I scored A on Pure Maths, I am no idiot Mr Bornat,
no way said he, pity the hippie necklace he wore I thought and dumped the course,
there is an economic crisis who will need work automation after all, I assured myself.