RSS Amplifier

Recent Questions - Retrocomputing Stack Exchange · Jul 15, 2023

What did CPU time and disk space cost at a CDC 6600 Data Center?

0
Sign in to vote or save

This page did not load. You can still read it on the original site — the toolbar below keeps your place in the directory.

In the mid-1970s,there was a big time sharing CDC service center in Waltham, MA. I'm curious what it cost to run computer jobs there. (My long winded story follows) In 1976, I had a summer job of "shuffling" decks of cards to pass to a CDC 6600 machine. My employer had this great big engineering simulation that took 30 minutes to run. My job was to, Prepare a deck of cards to pass to the machine,…

In the mid-1970s,there was a big time sharing CDC service center in Waltham, MA. I'm curious what it cost to run computer jobs there.

(My long winded story follows) In 1976, I had a summer job of "shuffling" decks of cards to pass to a CDC 6600 machine. My employer had this great big engineering simulation that took 30 minutes to run.

My job was to,

  1. Prepare a deck of cards to pass to the machine,
  2. Wait for 20-40 minutes for the operator to call my company's name,
  3. Call the boss back at the office with the results,
  4. He'd dwell on the results for a moment or two and tell me something like, "Let's try .1% Cesium."
  5. I'd type up a card for .1% Cesium, put it in the right place in the deck and repeat.

It was a good deal for the boss. He could sit at the office and do his smart PhD type stuff while a minimum wage summer student (me) was doing the sitting around the data center waiting.

The program was big and my deck was small so I believe we had to be paying for disk space, to go with the CPU time. What did it cost?

Read on retrocomputing.stackexchange.com

Comments

Nothing yet. Say the first thing.

    Sign in to join the conversation.