Purdue Computing Center

... more properly, Purdue University Computing Center or PUCC. (Renamed to Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP) in 2001.)

PUCC collected IBM 7094s which most companies were glad to give away. JohnSteele? kept them running and made them into terminal concentrators. The 7090 series had a great big SwitchRegister? that looked like a piano keyboard. It even had an electric motor to reset the switches after each operation.

PUCC started running CDC6000 equipment in the late 60s. By the mid 70s they had several of these which VicAbell? had bridged together with a system he called DualMace. GeorgeGoble did the same thing for the EngineeringComputerNetwork? by slapping a couple VAX780s together to make a DualProcessorVax. BillCroft wrote some good networking software for PUCC. Later, he wrote great networking software for George's engineering network. It must have been JohnSteele? that suggested Bill monitor his link protocol with a two-channel StripChartRecorder.

PUCC published job counts every month and considered it good every time they hit an all-time record. The trouble was, their job scheduler required estimation of bizzare parameters, like memory occupancy in mega-word-seconds. Estimate too high and you would be queued forever to let smaller jobs run. Estimate too low, and Bang, your job's kicked out, unfinished, but still contributing to another all-time high job count for the center. Moral: a ShallowMetric? is as likely to deceive as enlighten.