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In the early days of computing at Upjohn, there was little to no attempt at standardizion of vendors. That's why the ACC and RCC used mostly IBM machines, Control used DEC and Fine Chem used HP for their labs. In part, it had to be that way back then because one vendor didn't have the software and hardware to cover all the computing needs Upjohn had. In the 1970s, the leader of Physical and Analytical Chemistry (PAC) decided he wanted to use Harris computers for data collection and analysis. Apparently he had enough pull to use this small vendor. Once he retired, the era of Harris computers at Upjohn quickly ended. All that's left to remind us is a 4-inch ruler that was kept by Loraine Pschigoda. I would speculate such short rulers were provided for measuring peak heights on analytical instrument outputs. Harris Computer Systems lasted until 1996. It was then bought by and merged into the Concurrent Computer Corporation. |
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I found the photo below of an early Harris computer system on Flickr. Per Dave Webster, this was one of Sunderland Polytechnic's Harris H100 multi-user computer systems, circa 1980, which provided a service for 30 or so students at a time using display screen terminals. Fortran and BASIC were available as programming languages. The two boxes on the right are exchangeable disk drives, each with a capacity of 40MB - in today's terms you would have room for a handful of photos from a cell phone. There is a reel to reel tape deck for loading software upgrades and taking backups. An operating system upgrade typically took all morning and a backup perhaps an hour. I can't recall the exact model number of this mighty beast, or the CPU clock speed, but I think it had 512K of RAM. More power in a cell phone than this lot had. |
