Mainframe artefacts cabinet

As promised, we have expanded and refined our offering for the Great Exhibition of the North. In particular, we have added a third cabinet containing several artefacts from the very earliest computer mainframes at Newcastle University, including the Ferranti Pegasus (1957), KDF 9 (1964) and IBM 360/67 (1967).

Compared to the microcomputers adjacent, the mainframe computers were enormous: each mainframe  in turn occupied half of Claremont Tower’s vast (660 sqm) sub-basement machine room (the mainframes ‘overlapped’ in time, so that as one came in, the other was being prepared for decommissioning). See Roger’s introductory page at http://moca.ncl.ac.uk/ 

As well as the new cabinet we have made a number of refinements and improvements to the signage, thanks in particular to the hard work of volunteer Nick Tones.

We aren’t quite finished: There’s more to come, watch this space!