New Computer At Ham 60 Times Faster

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31407, 28 June 1967, Page 11

New Computer At Ham 60 Times Faster

In the next two or three months, the University of Canterbury hopes to install a new digital computer in the computer centre, recently completed and occupied at Ham. “This computer, an IBM 360/44, is one of the newest models on the market. It will be the first of its kind here to be installed in Australia or New Zealand. In fact the system ‘software’—the translating and other supporting programmes for it—is being released for general use by the manufacturers only a few weeks before the arrival of the Canterbury machine,” said the Vice-Chancellor (Professor N. C. Phillips).

‘The computer will accept punched card and paper tape and possesses a card-punch and 600 lines-a-minute printer for output,” he said. “Twindisc drives permit direct access to half a million words of information stored on magnetic discs which are used for the individual records of users. These features provide a substantial, significant and keenlyneeded addition to the computing facilities of the university.”

Perhaps the most notable feature of the new machine was the high speed with which it would perform arithmetic, analysis of machine use at the university having shown that this was a particularly important need. This high performance was achieved by the use of binary and hexadecimal (base 16) numbers. It is believed that this ■will be one of the fastest computing machines in the country.

As a result of these advances, the performance of the machine would be about 60 times better than that of the university’s original machine. This meant that the new computer would carry out in a minute as much work as the present machine would do in an hour. “Having regard to the expected future rate of growth of the university’s computing needs, this is a most desirable and indeed necessary feature of the new

i machine,” said Professor i Phillips. I “The machine itself possesses a substantial potential for future growth so as to increase not only the amount but also the variety of its services. It may, for example, be linked directly to experimental equipment to gather data or to control the experiment being carried out, and it may also be equipped with high-resolution plotting and I visual display devices. In sum, the new computer pro- | raises to give a substantial and welcome stimulus to research and other academic work in the university,” said Phillips.