Site Change History

25-Aug-2009

Added details on Clive B. Dawson's time with the Center to the Staff page.

11-Aug-2009

Added U.T. Record, Fall 1959, article “Computation Comes to Texas” to the Artifacts page.
Added Alcalde, January 1962, article “Machines That Think Faster Than Men” to the Artifacts page.

9-Aug-2009

Regenerated the "staff" pages with Philip Watson's first name spelled correctly.

6-Aug-2009

Added a photo of the COM building site, prior to the construction of COM, to the Artifacts page.
Added the architects' artist's concept drawing of COM to the Artifacts page.
Added two photos of the Computation Center (COM) building to the Artifacts page.
Added the 1963 floor plan of COM to the Artifacts page.
Added a photo of COM computer room in 1963, showing the CDC 1604 & 160, to the Artifacts page.
Added a photo of the IBM SP2 in the COM computer room, with Dr. Warlick, Marge Knox, Mike Cerda, and others, to the Artifacts page.

4-Aug-2009

Finally added Vance Strickland's COM machine room photos to the Artifacts page.

28-Jul-2009

Minor edits to the "brief history" page, as suggested by Dr. Warlick.
Added a complete list of Computation Center staff from its founding through August 31, 1996, as supplied by Dr. Warlick.

27-Jul-2009

Added a "More" link to Dr. Warlick's entry in the staff table.

8-Jul-2009

Received negatives of 35 Computation Center staff photos taken by Barney McCartney in June, 1986. Scanned, restored, retouched, selected the best among duplicates, and placed them on-line on the "Staff" page. With the help of many former Comp. Ctr. staff, almost everyone in the photos has been identified.

3-Jul-2009

Added photographer and date information to the User Services staff photo. It was taken by Barney McCartney in June of 1986.

3-Jun-2009

Added the building and room number to the OTS/Networking staff photo (SER 321K).
Added a note to the OTS/Networking staff photo about Bill Bard's retirement ≈5 months earlier.
Added Brendan Boerner's recollection that he was a CPA-1 to the staff page.

2-Jun-2009

Added name corrections, contributed by Vance Strickland and James Stolpa, to the User Services staff photo.
Added an "original scans" link to the Org. Charts index page, although the original scans have not yet been uploaded to the site.
Added the approximate date when Chris Cooley joined the Tools team to the Staff page.

30-May-2009

Restored the change bars to more of the "restored" pages of the Users Manual.
Added Google Analytics usage tracking scripts to all pages.
Added Chris Cooley's information to the Staff page.

29-May-2009

Improved the layout of the staff photo pages.
Added William Green's identifications of the people in the User Services staff photo.
Added Brendan Boerner's information to the Staff page.
Added a link to UT TeamWeb's history of the Web at UT to the "Brief History" page.
Submitted requests for fresh Internet Archive crawls via the Alexa service. (Nothing on the host "gargravarr.cc.utexas.edu" has been archived since 2007, for reasons unknown.)
Restored the change bars to more of the "restored" pages of the Users Manual.

28-May-2009

Restored the change bars to more of the "restored" pages of the Users Manual.
Reconstructed the Networking/OTS staff photo again, so that William Green's eyes would be open, and there'd be less of a green cast from the office's fluorescent lights. (Achieving the correct white balance is complicated by the combination of natural and artificial light sources.)
Added William Green's corrections to the identificatins of the Networking/OTS staff in the aforementioned photo.

27-May-2009

Added a scan of an old printout of an undated photo of User Services staff, from the collection of Vance Strickland. Wrapped it in a web page, and identified several of the people in it. (It was printed on a laser printer. If it was printed on an Apple LaserWriter, that means the print can't have been made earlier than 1986, if memory serves.)
Corrected the white balance of the Networking and OTS staff photo.
Made sure there were "back" links on all of the major pages.
Restored the change bars to some of the "restored" pages of the Users Manual.

26-May-2009

Wrapped a page around the Networking and OTS staff photo, and identified most of the people in it.
Restoration work on the recently scanned Computation Center Users Manual has 178 of 484 pages restored.

24-May-2009

Wrote the "History" page of this web site, based, in large part, on the history section of the Computation Center Users Manual which was written in July, 1972.

23-May-2009

Scanned the final 258 pages of the Computation Center Users Manual, 1974 edition, for a total of 484 pages.
Photographed the cover of the Computation Center Users Manual binder.
Began restoration work on the pages of the Users Manual.

21-May-2009

Scanned another 100 pages of the Computation Center Users Manual, 1974 edition. Scanning completed in 45 minutes, yielding a rate of 2.22 pages per minute. Not bad for hand scanning in 300 DPI full color. Scanning of this manual appears to be around 45% complete.

19-May-2009

Scanned another 26 pages of the Computation Center Users Manual, 1974 edition.

18-May-2009

Scanned the first 100 pages of the Computation Center Users Manual, 1974 edition, from the collection of James Stolpa.

16-May-2009

Google appears to discover the Computation Center History site for the first time, although it appears that it indexed almost none of its content.

13-May-2009

Added publication CCA-20, "University Mailbox Service: Free Internet Mail for UT Austin". From the collection of Don Nash.
Added a presentation introducing the University Mailbox Service in, or around, March of 1994. It is currently in the "Short Course" section, but should probably be moved to a dedicated section for presentations – if we find any more of them. From the collection of Don Nash.
Added the "Control Data Condensing Unit" nameplate to the Artifacts section. TFrom the collection of Don Nash.
Added more text to the "Paper Tape" page to explain the problem that most browsers have with displaying the tape graphic.

12-May-2009

Digitized 25.5 feet of a paper tape recently discovered by Larry Liberty in the Computation Center building. Digitizing and joining the segments to produce the final graphic took seven hours, so hopefully 25.5 feet of tape is a sufficient example to those who've never seen it before.

11-May-2009

Altered the Artifacts page to incorporate Charles Spurgeon's identification of, and information about, the H4000 Ethernet card.
Finally got around to scanning the back of the Cyber 6600/6400 Core Memory Module, which can now be seen on the Artifacts page. Thanks to James Stolpa for the long loan of the module.
Restoration of more issues of the already scanned Newsletter.

10-May-2009

Added the 15 slides from short course no. 115, "Introduction to Microcomputers", September 1990 edition, to the Short Courses section. Authored by, and from the collection of, Chris W. Johnson.

9-May-2009

Added the 16 pages of CCPM-2, "Names of Things: Terminology and Style for Computation Center Documents", November 1990 edition, to the Publications section. From the collection of Chris W. Johnson.
Added both pages of SDS-4, "PC SAS Distribution Program", September 1990 edition, to the Publications section. From the collection of Chris W. Johnson.
Added the 20 pages of CCRL-26, "IBM 3081-D Pocket Reference List", January 1988 edition, to the Publications section. From the collection of Chris W. Johnson.
Photographed the H4000 Ethernet card. From the collection of Chris W. Johnson, with thanks to Charles Spurgeon for the gift.

8-May-2009

Scanned, and performed basic cleaning of, the cover of the DEC "PDP-11 Processor Handbook for PDP-11/04/24/34a/44/70", from the collection of Chris W. Johnson. Added to the Artifacts section.
Scanned, and restored, the cover of the DEC "PDP-11 Software Source Book, First Edition", from the collection of Chris W. Johnson. Added to the Artifacts section.

7-May-2009

Photographed both pages of CCRL-27, "Using the IBM with ASCII Terminals", November 1986 edition. From the collection of Chris W. Johnson.
Photographed both pages of CCRL-27, "Using the IBM with ASCII Terminals", January 1990 edition. From the collection of Chris W. Johnson.
Photographed both pages of CCA-11, "Computation Center Text Processing Services", September 1990 edition. From the collection of Chris W. Johnson.
Photographed both pages of SDS-2, "VersaCAD Distribution Program", September 1990 edition. From the collection of Chris W. Johnson.
Photographed the 12 pages of CCRL-20, "UNIX Pocket Reference List", September 1992 edition. From the collection of Chris W. Johnson.
Photographed the "Control Data Cyber 170" nameplate, from the collection of James Stolpa. Added to the Artifacts section.
Photographed the DEC PDP-11/60 front panel, from the collection of Chris W. Johnson. Added to the Artifacts section.

6-May-2009

Restoration work on more of the previously scanned Newsletter issues.
Uploaded origina newsletter page scans that had previously been overlooked.

5-May-2009

Restoration work on more of the previously scanned Newsletter issues.

4-May-2009

Restoration work on more of the previously scanned Newsletter issues.

3-May-2009

Restoration work on more of the previously scanned Newsletter issues.

2-May-2009

Restoration work on more of the previously scanned Newsletter issues.
Scanned the "CDC - Control Data - Cyber 170 Display Station" nameplate, from the collection of James Stolpa. Added to the Artifacts section.
Scanned both sides of the IBM "Guage Card" for determining the correct alignment of punchcard equipment. From the collection of James Stolpa. Added to the Artifacts section.

1-May-2009

Corrected the file naming error that lead to the non-appearance of newsletters no. 15 and 20 in volume 10.
Scanned, uploaded, created tables-of-contents for, etc. the final 134 pages of the first binder of newsletters as collected by Tom Rioux and loaned to me from the collection of James Stolpa. That makes the collection about one month shy of the ten year mark, and brings the total number of Newsletter pages scanned to 1,015.

24-Apr-2009

Scanned the 48 pages of the 1990 edition of CCA-2, "Introduction to the Computation Center", from the collection of Chris W. Johnson.
Made further scans of the core memory module from the Cyber 6600/6400 Extended Memory.
Scanned the "blues brothers" anti-portrait of Vance Strickland, circa 1990. From the collection of Larry Liberty.
Began modifying the web site generation software to cope with the unexpectedly elaborate page numbering convention used in CCA-2.

22-Apr-2009

Scanned another 102 pages of the Computation Center newsletters.

20-Apr-2009

Scanned 57 pages of Computation Center and ACITS organization charts, assembled from the collections of Larry Liberty and PJ Abrahms.
Modified the web site generating software to automatically produce the web pages for the organization charts.

12-Apr-2009

Scanned another 222 pages of the Computation Center newsletters.

11-Apr-2009

Scanned another 273 pages of the Computation Center newsletters.

10-Apr-2009

Scanned another 139 pages of the Computation Center newsletters.

9-Apr-2009

Scanned another 135 pages of the Computation Center newsletters from the Tom Rioux collection. Unfortunately, page 7 of the November 1, 1968 issue is missing.
Scanned the 1958 memo announcing the appointment of Dr. Young as the Center's first director, from the collection of Chris W. Johnnson.

8-Apr-2009

Began scanning the Computation Center newsletters, starting with volume 1, number 1, of October 15, 1967. Collected by Tom Rioux, and entrusted to the care of James Stolpa. 11 pages scanned by midnight. Even Tom didn't have originals of some of the earliest issues and had to settle for photocopies.
Scanned core memory module from the Cyber 6600/6400 extended memory, from the collection of James Stolpa.

3-Apr-2009

Began this effort to find, digitally record, and place on-line the surviving history of the U.T. Austin Computation Center.