COMPUTING SERVICES CENTER
Wayne State University
In 194 7, Dr. Arvid Jacobson, Professor of Mathematics at Wayne University, arranged for the University to acquire from the Mass-achusetts Institute of Technology the mechanical differential analyzer invented and built by Dr. Vannevar Bush in the 1930's. This machine formed the nucleus for the development of mechanical and electronic calculation at Wayne University. A course in the solution of differential equations using the differential analyzer was taught by Dr. Jacobson beginning in 1948, and a project to build an elec-tronic digital computer for use by the University and the industrial community was begun.
This project was supported by Grants from many local firms including General Motors. Ford, Burroughs, Detroit Edison, J . L. Hudson, and others. The Wayne University Computer Laboratory, supported by industry, was established with Dr. Jacobson as director, and space was made available by the University on the fourth floor of Old Main to house the activity. In 1950, Dr. Harry Huskey, one of the pioneer computer logic designers, came to Wayne University as a visiting professor and became the project director of the computer development group. His previous association with people of the Burroughs Research staff at Paoli, Pennsylvania led to the joint Bur-roughs-Wayne University development of an electronic digital computer.
This computer was to be largely assembled from Burroughs laboratory pulse control modules which were being produced to facilitate various control functions in the nuclear physics laboratories working on atomic energy research. These modules plus some spe-cial memory drum controllers and shift registers were designed to be interconnected in a very flexible manner using coaxial cable with standard (BNC) connectors to carry pulse and direct current level information throughout the machine. Because of this modular construction from a few different types of units, it was decided to call the machine a Unitized Digital Electronic Computer. The acronym UDEC thus came into use.
The logical design of UDEC was a joint effort of Wayne State University and the Burroughs Research Laboratory, and one mach-ine based on the design was assembled at the Paoli, Pennsylvania laboratory, and one in the Wayne University Computer Lab. The design and development effort took until 1953 when the first U DEC was made operational at Wayne University.
MIDAC at the Willow Run Research Laboratories of the University of Michigan .
During the next few years. faculty members from the Wayne University departments of mathematics, chemistry, physics, and electrical engineering , as well as scientists from the research labor-atories of the major industrial backers of the Computer Laboratory, experimented with developing computer codes to solve a variety of problems. It is fair to say that much of the industrial community in the Detroit Metropolitan area had an opportunity to assess d ig ital computing for their own use in advance of most other areas in the United States. As a result of having UDEC available , institutes intro-duc in g digital computing were held during the middle and late 1950's and were attended by scientists from across the nation . During this time the first Wayne University course in computing was offered by the Mathematics Department.
In 1954, IBM introduced its Model 650 computer to the Detro it area at a summer institute held at Wayne University, and an IB M 650 computer was acquired by the Computer Laboratory in 1955.
As a result of Wayne University being establ ished as a State University in 1956, the payroll wou ld no longer be prepared by the Detroit Board of Education payroll department. Therefore a decision was made to write a payroll program for the University to use the IB M 650 computer. The decision to use the IBM 650 rather than UDEC was influenced by the fact that the IBM 650 used standard Hollerith punched cards as an input/output medium, whi le UDEC used punched paper tape. The University already had a set of IBM tabulating, sorting, collating and keypunch machines which were used to process .student records and registration information.
Under the supervision of Dr. Walter Hoffman , Assistant Director, the tabulating section was expanded into an e lectronic data process-ing operation usprocess-ing the IBM 650 along with the tabulatprocess-ing equip-ment to provide financial and student record processing. The first Wayne State University payroll check was written using a computer
in the fa ll of 1956.
Dr. Jacobson left the University in 1957. Dr. Hoffman served as acting director until 1959 when he was appointed director of the Computer Laboratory.
By 1959, U DEC had outlived its usefulness as a production computer and its components were re-purchased by the Burroughs Corporation to use in their own internal training programs. By this time the IBM 650 had been enhanced with add itional core memory
and additional disk and tape storage. It was being used for research as well as for processing the financial and student record data for the University.
In 1961 , Dr. Hoffman obtained a grant from the National Science Foundation for $1 ,200,000.00 to upgrade computer faci lities at WSU. In 1962 an IBM 7070 computer system supported by two IBM 1401 peripheral processors, later supplemented by an IBM 1460 processor, was acquired.
In 1962, along with the installation of the IBM 7070/1401 sys-tem, the Electronic Data Processing activity was merged with the Computer Laboratory to form the Computing and Data Processing Center(CDPClwith Dr. Walter Hoffman as;Oirector, Dr. Charles Briggs, Associate Director, and Mr. Roger Hardenbergh as Assistant Direc-tor in charge of data processing.
A lso in the fall of 1962, along with the inception of the quarter term system , a new sequence of computer science oriented courses was offered by the Mathematics Department. One of these, Mathe-matics 280, was a service course in FORTRAN programming for the College of Engineering. The College of Engineering initiated the successful completion of this course as a degree requirement of the college in the fall of 1962.
The IBM 7070/ 1401 was installed initially in the Cass Avenue side of the Administrative Services Building while conversion work was done at 5925 Woodward, the current location of WSU 's computer facilities. Conversion o f programs from the IBM 650 system was completed by the end of 1963 and the 650 was removed.
New and revised administrative programs to support the areas of stude nt records, registration, accounting, payroll, admissions and others were developed during the next few years, and a student oriented compi le-load-and-go batch system was developed and used extensive ly by the academic community. This system was called Wayne Automatic Student Preprocessor or WASP.
By 1966 the IBM 7070/ 1401 system was saturated, and plans were made to acquire additional capacity. The announcement in 1964 of the IBM System 360 series of computers was evaluated, and an order for a 360 Model 50 was placed .
added to the system. The 360/50 and the 360/65 were coup led using the Attached Support Processor (ASP) software and a channel-to-channel adaptor for CPU to CPU communication.
A clear need for more direct access to the computer by the user community than by batches of punched cards was being recog-nized throughout the international computer community. As a re-sult, a group of scientists from major university and research organizations including key people from the University of Michigan proposed that IBM build a computer based on the group's spec ifi-cations. This computer was specified to facilitate sharing the com-puter capacity among a large number of users sitting at typewriter-like terminals simultaneously connected to the central computer through telephone lines.
IBM agreed to build suc h a computer contingent on orders for five systems, one from each of the orig inal group. The news of this computer, which was announced as the IBM 360/67, spread rapidly through the academic and research community, and a decision was made at WSU to order such a system to replace the model 360/ 65. WSU 's order was among the first dozen orders for this advanced system.
IBM 's schedule for delivery of an operating system (Time Shar-ing System or TSS) for the Model 67 was much too optimistic, and the delivery of systems beyond the first five was delayed while IBM developed the operat ing system.
Consequently, a project was started at WSU to provide a time sharing facility based on IBM 's standard operating system OS/360 which was already operational on the IBM 360/50 and 360/65 mach-ines. This project was called WRAP for Wayne Remote Access Pro-cessor. The WRAP system design and implementation was a success, but the load placed on the IBM OS/ 360 software by the WRAP sys-tem exposed design and implementation flaws in OS/360 which made it impossible to use as a production system . WSU then sold the nonexclusive rights to WRAP to the IBM Corporation and to Applied Data Research. The Oakland County Data Processing Center also used a modified version of WRAP to provide access to their central computer by schools in Oakland County.
During the period of the WRAP project, IBM was working on the TSS project, and the staff at the U of M computing center was working on an interim system called Michigan Terminal System (MTS) which was designed to Lise the special hardware of the IBM 360/67. IBM announced the re-availability of the IBM 360/67 and
TSS, and the WSU Computing and Data Processing Staff began re-evaluating the old plan to replace the IBM 360/65 with a 360/67 system.
The tragic death of Dr. Walter Hoffman in late 1969 resulted in Dr. Robert Hubbard being appointed acting Director, while a search for a new director began . Because the plans for acquiring the IBM 360/ 67 system were so far advanced , Dr. Hubbard and the Computer Policy Committee, chaired by Dr. E. Burrows Smith, supported the recommendation of Associate Director. Dr. Charles Briggs and Assistant Director Robert Monroe that the IBM 360/ 67 Half Duplex system be accepted for delivery.
The 360/67 system was delivered in mid 1970, and it soon be-came clear that TSS was not able to support the WSU user com-munity in any reasonable way.
In the fall of 1970, Dr. Franklin H . Westervelt, Associate Direc-tor of the Computing Center of the University of Michigan, accepted the position of Director, Computing and Data Processing Center at WSU . Dr. Westervelt had been one of the key figures in the specifi-cation of the IBM 360/67 system. Soon after his becoming director, MTS was acquired from U of M td run on the IBM 360/67, and the second half of a two processor Full Duplex 330/ 67 system was placed on order and installed in July of 1971, replacing the IBM 360/ 50 which went to Oakland Community College.
The new hardware and software provided a very attractive com-puting resource, particularly to the academic community. Demand for the resource increased very rapidly, and plans were made to increase the capacity of the hardware ·already on hand without an increase in cash flow.
This aim was accomplished in various ways. First, a contract was entered into with Fairchild Corporation to develop and install a replacement for the existing IBM core storage. The new semi-conductor storage development project was very successful. It resulted in the WSU system having a larger amount of high speed storage on the IBM 360/ 67 duplex at a much lower cost than could possibly have been obtained from IBM.
Second, bids were solicited for replacement of the IBM peri-pheral devices such as disk and tape drives. In the years from 1971 to the present, peripheral devices from Control Data Corporation ,
A five year plan was started in 1972 whose aim was to begin a move for the CDPC from the position of a cost center to that of a profit center. As part of the plan, efforts were made to increase extra university funding for computer services through increased grants and contracts and by direct sales of faci lities and services, parti-cularly to other educational and governmental agencies in Michigan.
An additional part of the plan was to change from a 'scrip' alloca-tion of computer services to a real money charge to the various general fund budgetary units of the University.
By 1974 the existing hardware was becoming so heavily saturat-ed that it took users longer and longer to accompli sh their tasks. A survey of major vendors of computing equ ipment was begun with the aim of enhancing the WSU computing facilities within a 12 to 18 month period. The financial crisis of 1975 to 1976 delayed the acquisition of additional hardware , but during 1976 bids were solicit-ed from all major vendors, and the decision was made to acquire an Amdah l 470V / 6 to add to the capacity already on hand.
The Amdahl was installed in April, 1977 and was operated under the Virtual Machine (VM) operating system which made it appear to be several processors at the same time. The virtual machine en-vironr\-,ent made it possible to run al l the administrative operating systems plus test newer versions of MTS simultaneously on one machine. Acquisition of the Amdahl thus freed the 360/ 67 system for 24-hour MTS service, marking the beginning of a new five-year plan. The major goal of the new plan is service, service to students, faculty and the general MTS community. To reflect this goal, the Computing and Data Processing Center changed its name to the Computing Services Center (CSC). The end goal is to provide first quality service for about 400 to 500 concurrent terminal users.
It became obvious that even a totally ded icated 360/ 67 system was incapable of satisfying the ever-increasing demands of the MTS user community. In an effort to stay ahead of the demand, the
