Intercontinental Hotel, All Saints, City Hall, Bruce House huko nyuma…
Nairobi Traffic Police in 1930.
[ATTACH=full]232050[/ATTACH]
Mtwapa Creek Ferry early 1950s_
Picture shows two vehicles being ferried across Mtwapa Creek on the Mombasa-Malindi Road some 10 miles north of Mombasa. According to native legend the Creek, the native name of which is Shimo la Tawa (Hole of the Rock Cod), is the haunt of a giant man-eating rock cod. At the crossing place the creek is spanned by a chain which passes over pulleys at either end of the ferryboat. To effect a crossing a group of six to eight ferrymen travelling on the boat haul on the chain and so pull the boat across.
Date_1 January 1952
[ATTACH=full]232052[/ATTACH]
Kilindni Road, Mombasa, 1950s
[ATTACH=full]232055[/ATTACH]
hio mbicuff hapo ni pujo 403, believe you me subcounty kwa kina wakanyaks @Motokubwa kuna one of these still going stong
VC… hebu rudisha hiyo picha ya first class in lunatic express.
Sikuwa nimemaliza kuwank nayo aisee
Yaani wazungu wote walikuwa INSPECTORS
muhindi moja alikuwa SERGENT
waafrika wote walikufa wakiwa CONSTABLES:D:D
The Norwich Union building in 1967.
[ATTACH=full]232057[/ATTACH]
oops, just discovered the pics are not of the lunatic express, they are from the african express of Sout Africa
Mombasa Railway Station_
[ATTACH=full]232058[/ATTACH]
The President’s Office in the 1960s
[ATTACH=full]232060[/ATTACH]
[MEDIA=twitter]1113510426258571264[/MEDIA]
Look at the damage the matatu’s stage did to this beautiful location!
At the forground is the Minor Basilica. That was where the first stone building was built in Nairobi
Two men in the Nairobi railway workshops, manipulating a steel component being heated in a furnace to their right. Sparks flying and smoke billowing from the glowing furnace, 1960
[ATTACH=full]232061[/ATTACH]
Oil fired furnace for preheating steel to cherry red before shaping via hydraulic hammer.
The problem here this two gentlemen were not adequately dressed for this function. They contravened the safety rules for not using leather apron, safety boots and leather gloves.
President Jomo Kenyatta greeting a traditional dancer in front of a railway coach in 1963, soon after Kenyan Independence.
[ATTACH=full]232063[/ATTACH]
Old good days
Kilindini Road, Mombasa, 1955.
[ATTACH=full]232064[/ATTACH]
The first Super computers in kenya
[ATTACH=full]232065[/ATTACH]
The ICT 1500 at EAR&H_
As independence approached for Kenya in the mid 1960’s, some extra funds became available to help with the transition of the Government administration to complete local control. Two beneficiaries of this were the East African Railways & Harbours (EAR&H) which could now upgrade its 1202 HEC machine to an ICT 1500, and East African Power & Light (EAP&L) which also got an ICT 1500 to transition it from a conventional Hollerith site with Tabulators, Sorters, Collators, Calculators and Summary Punches.
Around 1964 the original 1202 at EAR&H was replaced by a more modern ICT 1500. This was a re-badged version of the American-built RCA 301. This machine was almost all solid-state (transistorized) and this particular unit had a central memory of 20,000 6-bit characters. It had 6 tape units and a printer made by Anelex that could operate at 1000 lines/minute. It also had card-reader built by RCA that could operate at 1000 cards/minute as well as a card punch built by ICT that could operate at 100 cards/minute.
Programming was done either in FAS (Fifteen-Hundred Assembler Code) or Cobol. The assembler and compiler operated from overlays held on tape, there was no operating system as we know it today. A minimal Cobol compilation took about 90 minutes to achieve, compiling a real production program would take between 2 and 3 hours. Thus it was usual to save the binaries once a program had been compiled successfully, and then debug/correct the binary from then on via octal corrections applied directly to the object program.
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.
Other important ICT installations in Kenya were East African Airways and the Post Office Savings Bank - however both of these sites used Powers-Samas equipment (40-column cards with round holes, and primarily mechanical rather than electro-mechanical tabulators, sorters and collators)
True. Niliiona moja pale Ndumberi na ingine pale Ikinu.