From punch cards to iPads

Posted: June 25, 2014 9:25 a.m.

Department of Computer Science faculty member Brien Maguire and his original identification card from 1972. U of R Photography Department

One of the biggest changes in the world since the University of Regina became an autonomous, degree-granting institution in 1974 has been computer technology. And someone who’s seen those changes first-hand is Computer Science faculty member Brien Maguire.

In the fall of 1972, Maguire joined the Regina Campus of the University of Saskatchewan as a special lecturer in the new Department of Computer Science. There were just two other instructors in the department when Maguire arrived in Regina after completing his graduate work at the University of Waterloo.

In those pre-iPad days, students would have to write their program statements onto paper coding forms. Then they would line up to use a keypunch machine in the library.

“You’d have a deck of blank cards going in from a hopper on one side and as you typed they’d come across in front of you, one card at a time, and be collected in another hopper,” recalls Maguire.

Once the cards were punched, they had to be carried in boxes to the Classroom Building, where the programs were then run.

Back then, computers were cumbersome – and expensive.

Maguire says in 1975 the department increased the storage of a computer by 8,192 bytes of memory – at a cost of $5,500. So how much would the memory in a typical laptop today cost if you were paying 1975 prices? Assuming four gigabytes of memory, approximately $2.8 billion.

Maguire also remembers when the department bought three disk drives in the mid-1970s. They were each the size of a large pizza – only thicker. This increased storage to 7.5 megabytes of available disk storage “and we thought this was fantastic.”  Maguire recently received an assignment from a student with a file size of 120 megabytes. “The notion of a student with a single file that large – we just didn’t comprehend those kinds of possibilities in those early days.”

For more about the University's 40 years of independence visit: www.uregina.ca/external/communications/feature-stories/current/fs-05072014.html

or the special issue of Degrees Magazine:

http://www.uregina.ca/external/communications/publications/degrees/index.html