I forgot to post this last year, which was when I discovered it during my effort to locate and preserve the rapidly disappearing history of The University of Texas at Austin Computation Center, but this year I shall not forget. So, without further ado, for the computational old-timers amongst us, I offer “Twas the Night Before Christmas — In the Computation Center” by Kathy Atkins, from the Computation Center Newsletter, Vol. VII, No. 7, of 17-Dec-1973:
Enjoy the holidays, folks.
I recently had the opportunity to write a fun bit of software: an automatic organization chart generator that generates the chart using Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG).
Little did I know that, when I sent an example of the software's output to my boss, declaring it to be working, and rather nicely I thought, what he saw when he viewed it in Safari was a hideous mess – unrecognizably bad compared to how it looked in Safari on both of the Macs I use. For one thing, the text was incredibly ugly. Seemingly bit mapped. For another, the portions of the text that were supposed to be bold were rendered plain (and, again, incredibly ugly). To top it all off, the conformance of the text to the stated metrics was terrible. Had I known that my boss would see something so awful, I wouldn't have sent it.
It took some back and forth, but I finally figured out why the SVG looks so bad on most other people's Macs. It's a setting in the "Appearance" pane of "System Preferences"; the one at the bottom labelled "Turn off text smoothing for font sizes __ and smaller." I believe the default value is 12, though I changed the setting so long ago, I don't remember for sure. In any case, being a big believer in anti-aliased type, I always set that value to the smallest one possible, which is currently 4. In my org. charts, I was using a font size of 8 pixels. While I'm not sure how we're mapping pixels to points these days, the key was that the font size in the SVG fell beneath the system's "Turn off text smoothing" threshold. So, "unsmoothed" text was drawn, and, judging by how badly it scaled and how ghastly it looked, I think it actually reverted to a bit map.
Interestingly, Firefox ignores that setting and uses "smooth" fonts anyway. Also, Firefox, at least as of version 3.0.11 and Safari 4.0.1, draws the text much nicer (for lack of a more specific term) than Safari – even after you get Safari using "smooth" fonts. Usually I find that Safari's SVG support is better than Firefox's, but not in this case. Well done, Firefox developers.
An example organization chart is included below. It describes the structure of the U.T. Austin Computation Center in February, 1988.
A lot has changed since then. One change is that U.T. Austin no longer has a Computation Center, and is rapidly running out of people who remember when it did have one, which is a shame. Also, only a handful of the people in that chart still work for the University at all.
I've recently been on a quest to find and begin digitally archiving the surviving history of the University of Texas at Austin's Computation Center, which was responsible for the academic side of computing on campus from 1958 until it was merged with our data processing and telecom shops into a new department called Information Technology Services (ITS) a handful of years ago. The result of that merger and the passing of time is that much of ITS seems never to have heard of the Computation Center, which did a lot of good work that shouldn't be forgotten.
While searching for copies of the Computation Center newsletters (none of which I had had the foresight to keep), the same colleague who seems to have the only existing set that is even potentially complete, revealed to me one of our forgotten holy relics: A core memory card from our Control Data Corporation Cyber 6600, or 6400 computers, or the extended core memory that they shared. Anyway, core memory.
The card, which measures 4.125 inches on each side, looks like this:
In extreme close-up you can see the ferrite rings (the "cores") that magnetically stored the data, supported by the matrix of fine wires (slightly thinner than a human hair) that run through the middle of the rings, allowing data to be written-to, and read-from, them. Each one stored a single bit of data. If I've counted correctly, this board stored 4,356 bits of data.
I remember our Cybers, but never did any work with them. However, years before joining the Computation Center, I did do much of my early programming on a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11/34 (running RSTS/E) that also used core memory.
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