Vintage Calculators

[Craig]

That is really interesting and a trip down memory lane! I was there from '74 to '77, and remember the red brick Zeppler building well. But I never met the man himself.

You must be a few years older than me, but our paths probably did cross. I also spent a year there working for Professor John Betts (we discussed this by email a while ago!).

The picture of Eric Zepler I was referring to hung in the entrance foyer (if you could have called it a foyer!) of the Zepler Building, right opposite the main door...

Zepler came across as a really nice gentle guy. I have no idea what he was doing in the building at that hour - maybe he was at a social do at the university and decided to visit his namesake?

Whatever the reason, I'm glad I met him - a true pioneer of RF design.

The building was a bit of a horror story of narrow corridors, old cream-painted brickwork and dodgy infrastructure. I loved it though

Talking of cigars - you may remember then then head of the EE department - an imposing character with a large frame and follicly challenged... he lit a cigar up in the machine room where the Modcomp and Honeywell machines  were. When I politely indicated the No Smoking signs, I got a swift put-down - "It's a privilege of being HEAD OF THE DEPARTMENT"...

Them was the days...

Henry K?

Poor John Betts I believe died in a car accident in his classic car. He was a fine lecturer - I still have his book Signal Processing, Modulation and Noise on my bookshelf.

I well remember the Modcomp IV. At least it was easier to use than the ICL mainframe in the maths building, complete with punched card programming. If you anticipated using the full 32kB of core store you had to submit written permission from your supervisor. It could take two days from handing in a bunch of cards to getting the results as a line printer doorstep. There were teleprinter terminals, although they were reserved. Although a mate worked out how to log on, and then issue a control sequence that initiated a core dump. A hacker 1976 style.

Fast forward to today, and I felt aggrieved when a spice simulation took as much as a minute to produce intermodulation spectra.

Craig