The first computer ever used in East Africa was installed at the Railways account department Nairobi in 1964.
The computer I.C.L “1500” was used for accounting applications ,payroll and statistics.
By 1969 the Railway had developed expansive computer systems benefiting all its departments and also had the largest computer room in East Africa.
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cc: @Deorro
At about the same time as the ICT 1500 was installed at EAR&H, a similar machine was installed at East African Power & Light (EAP&L)
This was a “shared” machine, used during the day-shift by EAP&L for electricity billing, and during night-shift as a Service Bureau (Data Center) by ICT(EA) for others of their customers. The first of these was the Post Office Savings Bank (maintaining accounting records of savings accounts) and the Kenya Tea Development Authority (KTDA) for generating payments to small-holder tea farmers.
The console was divided into three banks of lights/buttons. On the left were error indicator lights, in the center were buttons with which to select what was to be displayed (memory address or status codes) and the display was shown on the right-hand part. The latter were buttons with lights, so that the operator could for example bring up the contents of a memory word (in binary) and then modify it via the buttons and cause the new value to be stored in a selected memory location.
On the shelf over the console can be seen two decks of cards. These were the “loader” and a spare backup copy in case a card got mangled. To initiate the running of a program, the operator would first insert a very short boot sequence into memory from the console. This boot sequence was just enough to cause a single card to be read into memory containing a further set of seven instructions and a “jump” into these instructions. The latter then caused a second card to be read with more instructions and so on until the whole loader had been loaded. This was then used to load whatever production program was desired.
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This picture shows the same scene from the other side. This is the front of the Anelex printer which printed on “Fanfold” paper up to 18" wide and 136 characters on a line. It was a drum printer, the drum had the characters A-Z and 0-9 arranged around its circumference 136 times. The drum spun continuously at 1000 r.p.m. and 136 separate hammers (solenoid activated) smacked the ribbon against the paper as the corect character came round in each column position.
If due to program error, you clobbered the print table in memory, causing print hammers to try and strike more than once per revolution, you’d blow the fuse for that print hammer. Since clobbering the print table caused this to happen for all columns, you’d actualy blow 136 fuses in one shot, which took quite a while to replace - during which time the machine was down.
To the right we can see the three tape units on the other side of the tape cabinet - this was before tape reels became standardised at 10.5" diameter with a 3.5" hub, holding 2400 ft. of 1/2 inch tape.
cc: @Jazzman
Where is the monitor:eek:
so freaking big. Ungewaambia years later comp would be so small ungebeba mgongone wangekuchekelea
Wangekupiga kwanza juu ya kuwa “radicalised na vigilantes”
Ungepelekwa mathare
The days Kenya Railways was a giant before it was brought down by corruption…
and to think all that sahii inafit ndani ya cheap chinese smartphone dunia imetoka mbali
Aliens my friend, its the damn aliens!
If only we had had selfless leaders during the formative years sai tungekuwa mbali. Sasa ndio hii kavita kananukia na tunang’ang’ana kulipa pesa ya eurobond na tungefaa kuwa donor wa aid sio recipient
for your info that computer is stil in use! it is a legacy system in Kenya Railways… Vijana wameshidwa kuitumia hadi wa leo i think we have less than 5 guys in kenya who can program that cobol beast…
Where is it located?
spot @admean and fellow machine operators
Can you get a pic of that beast
Nikienda consultancy that area I will…
iko block C Hapo HQ and for sure Nav programmers/ SAP programmers could not figure out the code and do equivalent program to render it useless.
COBOL is still superb than high level languages
Si ulete picha…na si tafadhali!
I dont consult thr each day, Will post nikienda uko
Waiting