Engineering Memory of the Month

The early days of computing

Stanford’s Department of Computer Science is celebrating its 40th anniversary this month, but engineers were already heavy users of computers even before the mid-1960s.

The Stanford News Service pictured is from the August 1963 dedication of Stanford Engineering’s Computation Center, a 34,000-square-foot facility that at the time was one of the largest university computer centers on the West Coast. The brand-new, mammoth-sized machines installed in the center were an IBM 7090 and a Burroughs B5000.

These computers gave the school 50 times the computing power it had back in the late 1950s when alumnus Roger Ellman (MS, ENG ’59 EE) was a graduate student. He recalls working on an IBM 650 computer (which the 7090 replaced). “The printer was half the size of a small automobile,” he recalls. “Input and output were via IBM punched cards. The memory was a rotating magnetic drum providing 2,000 ‘words’ of 10 bytes per word. Wow! 20 kilobytes! But you could do some pretty extensive programming with that back then.”

Share your memories (anecdotes and photos, not rotating magnetic drums) with David Orenstein, manager, Communications and P.R.