NMH Magazine : Fall 2003

History Lesson

NMH fully entered the computer age in fall 1971 when the school received its own computer. The behemoth machine, a PDP-11—the 11 stands for 11k of memory—took up an entire room in Beveridge. The computer required a large cast of caretakers: a computer-center director, 15 work job students, and on-call technicians and engineers to deal with its frequent crashes. For all this, what did it do? In its first year, the computer scheduled courses.

Made by the Digital Equipment Corporation, the PDP was a time-sharing system. Three local high schools—Greenfield, Pioneer Valley, and Mohawk Valley—bought time shares in the computer, which used an expanded version of BASIC as its programming language. It operated six days a week, Sunday through Friday, and had five terminals on the Mount Hermon campus and three on Northfield.

Given that today’s typical laptop has 256MB of random access memory and many multigigabytes of storage space, it’s no surprise the PDP-11’s heyday is long gone. But without a doubt, the computer had an impressive presence.