I was reading Doug Gale’s history of computing at Cornell:
The first personal computer that I owned was a Terak. It was a graphics workstation with an elegant Pascal interpreter. The Terak had a 16-bit processor based on Digital’s LSI/11 chip set, but most of the early computers used lower cost 8-bit microprocessors.
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In talking to the faculty I learned that Cornell had a great Computer Science Department established in 1965. Better still, the person teaching the Introductory Computer Science course was Tim Teitelbaum. Tim had been one of the people living at night in the back of the Columbia computer room. At Columbia Tim was working on a Hough Powell device that was channel connected to the center computer. The device scanned film of particle collision events in Cloud and Bubble Chambers and digitized particle tracks. I subsequently discovered that Tim deserved a great teacher award. Tim was the dynamo at Cornell behind the computer literacy efforts in the Computer Science Department. He had written a PL1 program synthesizer for a Terak microcomputer and was in the process of converting instructional computing in the department to microcomputers.
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Microcomputers in Instruction: The Terak Story
Cornell was one of the first universities to embrace microcomputers in undergraduate instruction. The Com¬puter Science faculty were strong advocates of structured programming and foreswore languages such as Basic that were used in most microcomputers at the time. Tim Teitelbaum, in the Computer Science Department, had developed a PL-1 synthesizer that ran on the university’s IBM 360-168 mainframe and was used in a course required of all engineering and most science freshman. The synthesizer created a “padded cell” environment that simply did not allow the student to write unstructured code.
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facilities, Tim developed a version that could run on the Terak 8510, a microcomputer. The Terak was considerably more powerful than contemporary mi¬crocomputers based on Intel, Zilog, and Motorola CPUs. One downside was that they cost around $5500, as I recall. Another was the 40+ pound weight of the base-processing unit alone.
Cornell made a major investment in Terak computer rooms to service the introductory programming course that Tim taught and was required of all engineering students. DACS was charged with running the facilities. The problem was that there were never enough Teraks. The days before an assignment was due were chaos. The undergraduates hired to run the facilities and ration use were faced with students concerned about passing a required course. We could measure how crowded the facilities were by counting the number of fights that broke out as students vied for machines. My efforts to get the various Deans to commit funds to expand the facilities were generally unsuccessful. It was always someone else’s students who were using the facilities.
This was a new variant of the old problem of how do you pay for computing. The new twist was that we didn’t have an accounting mechanism that would allow us to use the somewhat-effective mechanisms that we devel¬oped in the ’60s and ’70s. Other than paper sign-in sheets maintained by the computer room assistants, we didn’t know who was using a Terak. And once the student was on a machine, we didn’t have a clue as to what he or she was doing. We did try to manually limit each student to an hour of machine time. Before committing additional funding, the Deans wanted evidence that it was their students who were using the machines and how much they were using them.
The Teraks were built with a DEC LSI-11 processor and could run a basic version of UNIX, as well as UCSD Pascal. It had a graphic’s processor and could display both text and graphics in monochrome.
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Maintenance
In the 1980s computer maintenance was a major expense. The yearly maintenance cost for a mainframe typically was in the six digits. Maintenance was also a major expense for microcomputers, particularly in the early 1980s. Because of the mild summers in Ithaca, many of the buildings at Cornell were not air-conditioned, and temperature was simply regulated by opening or closing windows. Unfortunately, a Terak and a person each put out around 150 watts of heat, so a 30-student lab generated approximately 9,000 watts of heat. One lab in the engineering building was particularly troublesome. It only had a few windows and on a calm day it would become uncomfortably warm, and the Teraks would start failing as their integrated circuit chips overheated. Tom Everhardt, the Dean of Engineering and all around fine fellow, and I went ’round and ’round on the need to air-condition the room. I went so far as installing thermistors on the surface of the CPU chips to monitor and document the fact that chips were failing because of the heat. In 1980, a room filled with microcomputers and students was something of a novelty.
At $10,000 a pop, the Teraks were not a consumer item that you could buy at the local computer store. The company was small and did not have a network of national service centers. To repair one, you had to box it up and send it back to the factory in Arizona. (Remember, the base unit weighed more than 40 pounds.) That was expensive and had a turnaround time measured in weeks. We quickly decided that it would be cheaper to send one of the DACS technicians to Arizona to work at the factory for several weeks and learn how to repair them, and then maintain a local inventory of parts. Upon the technician’s return from Arizona, we borrowed a VHS video recorder and on a Saturday afternoon, fueled with takeout sandwiches and a six pack of beer, put together a cheesy “How to Fix a Terak” video. Although it was originally intended for our own internal use, as other universities learned of its existence it became widely requested.