CNN SOFTWARE SUPPORT

CCN supported a whole host of software systems. In a memo dated September 25, 1978, Carmichael alerted the GSM faculty and TA's to Computer Orientation Classes offered by the Office of Academic Computing (formerly CCN) during the Fall Quarter.These include:

SPSS, SAS, BMD, JCL, QUICKRUN, FORTRAN, PL/1, URSA, TSO, and APL.

I am surprised that neither COBOL nor PL/C is on this list because computing instruction in GSM, primarily courses 113A and 113B, migrated from the long time use of

FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator), to

COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language) for business file and record data processing, to

PL/1 (an IBM languge) that combined the computational characteristics of FORTRAN with the file and record processing of COBOL into one language with more extensive string processing added, to

PL/C (Cornell version of PL/1), to

APL (A Programming Language), for interactive programming.

Perhaps by the time GSM settled on APL as the interactive instructional language, OAC had decided to discontinue support for COBOL and PL/C.

In the summer of 1979, OAC replaced the IBM System 360 Model 91 that had been its mainframe computer for several years with an IBM 3033. The Model 91 was, I believe, one of only 25 manufactured by IBM and UCLA had two of them: one in OAC and one in the Healtth Sciences Computer Facility. The 3033 was twice as fast as the 91 and had twice as much main memory, 8 megabytes versus 4 megabytes. APL users in GSM found that they had more workspace and that the connect charges were reduced from $4.00 per hour to $2.50.