Just sharing some readings from my unsuccessful searches related to Kids demoing computers in Selfridges, London in 1969?:
From a Facebook post in the Hatfield Polytechnic Group - more anecdotes in the comments there. Archived versions here and here are only partial.
From Computer Weekly, the winter of 1969/70
“Hatfield’s PDP-10 to be made available to local schools
A major project which will allow substantial computer access to schools in Hertfordshire will come into operation in September when Hatfield Polytechnic completes its installation of a DEC PDP-10 multi-access computer valued at nearly £300,000. The polytechnic has previously experimented with computer education in schools linking schools to one of its two Elliott 803B machines. This facility was limited to six schools and allowed each school only about one hour per day of central processor time. The new computer will have a 64K 36-bit word core store with a fixed disc of 500,000 words capacity, two exchangeable disc units of 5.2 million words each, four DEC tape units and paper tape and punched card peripherals. A PDP-8/I will be used as communications processor. (8/1/70 p12)”
Origin of the Term Minicomputer
In the 1960s … [DEC] saw the PDP-8 as the prototype for a whole new genre of computers.
…
John Leng flew to London to establish DEC’s presence in the UK. He sold PDP-5s and then PDP-8s with tremendous success. In the mid-sixties, miniskirt fever raged on London’s Carnaby Street. … He sent back sales reports: “Here is the latest minicomputer activity in the land of miniskirts as I drive around in my Mini Minor.” The phrase caught on at DEC, and then the industry trade publications grabbed on to it. The age of the minicomputer was born.
1957 possible origin document for DEC: Digital Computer Corporation proposal and request for funding. (11 page PDF)
Digital Equipment Corporation – History from 1957 to the present (1978, 98 page PDF)
Late 70s computer in school
First-Hand:PDP-8/E OMNIBUS Ride - by Remo J. Vogelsang, a personal history of work as an engineer at DEC from 1968 to 1972. Be sure to read the footnotes too.
Hello Grant, You might remember, it has been almost exactly 40 years ago at DEC, when you asked me to look into the time-random, location-sensitive problem we ran into just before shipping the first batch of those wobbling, apple-pie sized, fixed-head disk drives. I can still quite closely recall how we figured out the puzzle of the effect of a combination of electro-statically charged read/write heads together with the discharging trigger caused by the stray-field of the hysteresis motor. Application of some conducting glue for attaching the heads was the simple solution. Since then, the continuous evolution of disk drives was driven to an unbelievable scale.
A recollection of TREAC at Malvern, and the arrival in the market of DEC’s offerings.
until then the provision of digital computing had been the preserve of the Mathematics department who tended to give the impression to us practical merchants that they did not wish to know about the real world. But that situation would change radically as the fifties gave way to the sixties, when digital modules that could be assembled into primitive computers started to spread like a rash across the laboratories. By the end of the 1960s hardware from that upstart firm, DEC, and in particular the ubiquitous PDP-8, was everywhere, along with copious give-away manuals, making do-it-yourself computing a reality.
Looking back one can only regret that all that high quality effort that went into the design and building of the Malvern machines did not find - or even make any attempt to find - a commercial outlet. Yet perhaps the most telling mistake that we made in those early years was that it never seemed to enter any of our heads that TRE could have been an ideal source from which to spin off firms like the early DEC, rather than like IBM.
Welcome to a History of Computing at the London Grid for Learning website
