And my PhD thesis in 1975 was typed on a 10cps teletype that output paper tape in the Machine Intelligence Research Unit in Hope Park Square at Edinburgh. Typing mistakes were quicker to fix by splicing in the punched out holes and manually punching the new ASCII character code.

The machine at lancaster when you were there was an ICL 1909 with 32K 24-bit words and 4 tape decks. Jobs were submitted on punch cards.

Andrew Colin and I added a exchangeable disk store holding 2 Megabytes. The drive cost £40K, half from EPSRC (then SRC) and half from the computer board, as a consequence of the Flower’s report (his first I think — Peter Buneman’s step dad) and we implemented a batch operating system taking 2K words, called June after the head operator, that then ran the batch service you allude to. Once we had done that, as we streamed input and output vi two of the tape decks, the rate of handling small jobs was much improved.
With Wallace Anderson and Andy Lister, we bought a PDP8 (8K of 18-bit words?) and attached 8 teletypes to it, using it as a multiplexor and text editor, with a maximum of 256 words/teletype for the editable text buffer. We connected it to the ICL1909, and you could edit and submit jobs to it. That was working by late 1969 before I returned to Cambridge.

I think there was another PDP8 obtained later for teaching; perhaps that is the one you used via its keys; although the replacement machine (which I had arranged to be a PDP10 and which was another ICL machine) ran a new ICL operating system: George 3, and all our work was discontinued. I worked on the DEC10 writing the POP-2 system for it with Ray Dunn for Donald Michie’s round table, and was already hooked.

The Computer manager was Wallace Anderson, he later went to Aberdeen to be computer services director there.

I was a PDRA for a year and then a lecturer in the Maths department, under Elwyn Lloyd. Andrew & I designed the CS course, got it off the ground, and then did a UDI from Maths.

John Scott did most of the ICL POP2 compiler. He who entered a chess program as a schoolboy, running on our 1909, versus Greenblatt’s (?) chess program running on the MIT system, at the Machine Intelligence Workshop, 1968.

My initial experience with interactive systems was with Cambridge Titan & Digital’s DEC 10. At that time the DMIP mindset was paper-tape in and out of an Elliot 1409. I used the Timesharing service on the DEC10 run by Timesharing Ltd in Tottenham Court Road via an acoustically coupled modem that the GPO would not approve of from my house in the country in Dolphinholme. After an hour or two, I would get the teletype covered with splodges because an operator in the Morcambe manual exchange would have heard the weird noise, when wondering why the call was so long and listening in; she would then be plaintively asking “Is there anyone there?” sometimes generating or corrupting characters.

EMAS was much later.

We wrote about the Lancaster operating systems in the Computer Bulletin.

Thanks for the chance to reminisce…