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The first computers in East Africa


As part of the British Empire, East Africa was able to get a few computers that were just appearing on the market at that time. What were these computers and what was their fate, says Cloud4Y.

In short: one of these computers subsequently ended up at the bottom of the ocean, and the second (suddenly!) In China.

In 1889, Herman Hollerith ( photo of the inventor ) received a patent for the machine he invented, which used punch cards to carry out accounting operations. Instead of manually specifying the same numbers to create documents, you could write information on a small cardboard rectangle. On each map there were twelve rows of twenty holes in each (the usual 18x8 cm map format with 12 lines and 80 columns appeared only in 1928). These holes were punched by a device similar to a printing press. She was called the Hollerith Tabulator.


Card Hollerith


Tab

These cards were in demand everywhere where large accounting operations were performed. We can say that this was the first system in the world to process a large amount of data. Punch cards were placed in a special device that automatically counted the number and location of punched holes. The devices were electromechanical, that is, they did not use any electronics like transistors. After all, at that time transistors were not even invented.

The tabs were large and heavy devices with an electric motor rated at 3 or 4 horsepower. Engines rotated a lot of gears, wheels and clutches, which turned on / off the wheels from the rotating shafts depending on the location of the holes on the card. Devices were able to read information from the card, add (or subtract) numbers and print the results on paper. But they could not multiply, divide or perform other operations. There was no corresponding “program”.

Hollerith was awarded several prizes, received many accolades and the title of professor at Columbia University. “This machine,” Electrical Engineer wrote admirably, “works as flawlessly as the machines of immortal gods, but far surpasses them in speed.” Hollerith proudly called himself the "first statistician engineer", however, the way it was in reality. He organized the Tabulating Machine Company (later renamed British Tabulation Machine Company Limited, BTM), and sold them to railway departments and government agencies. Tsarist Russia bought Hollerite cars, deciding to conduct a population census at a modern level. Here is an interesting newspaper article of the time.


Cholerite in Russia

Later, Cholerite began production of more advanced machines, and in 1924, 5 years before his death, he created IBM. In 1951, the company, which is now known around the world, decided to create computers called HEC2M. HEC stands for Hollerith Electronic Computer.

The first appearance of computers in Africa



Hollerith Punch

In the mid-1950s, BTM opened a store in Nairobi called BTM (EA) Ltd. The head office was on the second floor above the Boero Auto Show, directly opposite the Donovan Mawl Theater. One of the first companies to place orders for these bulky computers was the East African Railways and Ports (EAR & H) and the East African Power & Light (EAP & L) energy company. In the case of railways, the main task was to record salaries and print out payrolls for several thousand employees, and EAP & L created a system for billing electricity.

The African company EAP & L had several thousand punch cards with the names and addresses of their customers, as well as a personal client number. Every month, employees of the company took readings of counters. These data were indicated in another card with the customer number. Then, two sets of cards (addresses and the amount of electricity consumed) were collected in a single deck, which was introduced into the cholerite tab. And at the output, they received printed monthly statements and invoices for mailing to customers.

There were other small organizations that used BTM equipment - the Post Bank, East African Airways, and the Kenyan police.

You did not forget that the operations of multiplication and division were an impossible task for most machines? In general, there was a mechanism called the "multiplier" in which the lamps were used. These were the predecessors of transistors intended for use in radios and televisions. The device could read two numbers from a punch card, multiply (or divide) them and split the result back into different columns on the same card. The problem was that he was not very reliable. And this is to say the least.

Lamps easily burned out. And when the work goes with large amounts of data, then a lot of lamps are involved. And it was extremely likely that when processing, for example, several thousand punch cards with data on electricity, one of the lamps would fail.

It should be noted that the needs of companies, even such complex machines did not completely cover. For example, EAP & L wanted to use a “tiered” billing scheme with a relatively low cost of electricity within a certain volume and a higher one when going beyond the set limit. But punch card equipment of that time did not allow to achieve anything so complex.

But in the late 1950s, things happened that became the reason for writing this article. First, the first computers available to business appeared on the British market. Secondly, BTM teamed up with a competitor called Power-Samas to form a new enterprise: ICT (in Africa - ICT (EA) Ltd.) Thirdly, the company announced the release of its first computers for open sale. It was a model of the HEC 1200 series, and one of the devices, called ICT 1202, was ordered by the East African Railway.

What the device looked like


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Operation difficulties



Hollerith Statistical Machine

As mentioned earlier, ICT 1202 was programmed to calculate the salaries of company employees. It allowed us to process data faster, taking into account different hourly rates for overtime work rates, various allowances (for example, bicycle allowances for employees who needed him at work) and bonuses for station managers.

But with this machine it was not so simple. It used a lot of lamps, even more than in the “multiplier” it supplanted. Thousands instead of hundreds. This meant that the likelihood of failure of a lamp also increased significantly. Thus, the average uptime of the machine was not too long. And at the beginning of the day shift, engineers carried out special stress tests on the machine, working on it at slightly higher and lower voltages, for which it was designed. So they tried to provoke the failure of “weak” lamps so that they could be found and replaced before the work day began.

Interestingly, the ICT 1202 consumed so much power that the device could only be turned on in the morning after the local bakery finished baking its bread. The reason is that the local power station could not generate enough energy to simultaneously power both the bakery ovens and the computer. Therefore, the bakery baked bread at night, and in the morning sent a message to the staff working with the computer that all the ovens were turned off. Only after that the machine was started. How did it become clear that the bakery and ICT 1202 cannot work simultaneously? This was found out empirically. When the stoves and the computer were turned on at the same time, this led to the explosion of the transformer.

The computer also had specific changes. The machine generated a lot of heat, which had to be removed from the room. Since air conditioning, in the form in which we know it today, was not available in Nairobi at that time, a special exhaust hood was made to extract hot air from the cabinets through the window.

The car itself was located in an old wooden building near the main railway station, which was built on short poles about a foot from the ground (like many old buildings in Nairobi). Large air vents were cut into the floor to let in fresh outdoor air into the room. The main computer cases were equipped with metal casings, in which there were exhaust fans that constantly sucked fresh air into the machine through openings in the floor and ventilated it through channels leading outward. But this architecture led to the death of the car.

One of the staff serving the ICT 1202 was Kuldip Singh Sunde. In general, he was a policeman, but earned money by checking every day at 5 in the morning if the ovens were turned off in the bakery. After that, he started the car, which took about half an hour, because different devices had to be switched on sequentially in order to avoid a big jump in electricity consumption. After that, Kuldip Singh went to the police station.

Kenyan police patrolling Nairobi at the time usually did not carry weapons. But it was precisely during that period that in the area where the majority of Somalis lived, skirmishes often occurred. Therefore, Kuldip Singh was armed with a pistol.

One morning, as usual, he came to launch ICT 1202. Despite the fact that the car turned off for the night, it was warm enough in it compared to the invigorating morning coolness on the street. Therefore, at night, snakes crawled into the building in search of heat. One of them twisted around an amplifier for a magnetic drum. It was a nice warm place.

When Kuldip, who was not expecting a dirty trick, opened the cabinet door to turn on another device, he was met by a frightened hiss of a snake ready to attack. The snake rushed at the policeman, but he was able to dodge. Crouching about something, Kuldeep fell to the floor, and a snake crawled on him. A policeman grabbed a gun and shot at a snake. Of course, he missed. But the bullet hit the drum computer, which actually turned the car into a useless pile of iron.

The snake slipped into darkness, Kuldip remained unharmed, and the ICT 1202, the first real computer in East Africa and the pride of the East African railways, was now useless. In order for the device to work again, it was necessary to order a new drum from the UK. And for this it will need to be manufactured, then shipped and connected. This process should have taken several months.


Hollerith Factory

Fortunately, a replacement for 1202 was already planned, and a new machine, the ICT 1500, was already heading to Kenya's Mombasa. It was a second generation car. All computer logic circuits were built using new transistor technology, and the device could have 6 magnetic tape drives in addition to a card reader and a linear printer, which was a revolutionary breakthrough in computer technology.

African IT park modernization


But if you think that the history of HEC 1202 is over, then you are mistaken. There was a sequel. Technically, the car was owned by ICT (EA), which monthly rented it to EAR & H. When the computer was imported into the country, the import duty on it was not paid, since the device should have been used exclusively by government agencies. If the import duty were paid, it would turn out that the government would itself charge import duties.

But when the car crashed and stopped being rented out to government organizations, it became owned by ICT (EA). So, the duty must be paid. And this is a lot, a lot of money for useless pieces of iron. The only way out is the export of ICT 1202 from the country. But exporting a ton of iron garbage weighing several tons from Kenya to England is not the most practical way to spend money.

However, a solution was found. Nowhere was it said that the computer should return to the UK. He just had to leave the territory of East Africa. And it all simplifies. The computer was loaded into a railway carriage and sent to Mombasa, where it was transferred to the barge deck. The barge was towed 5 km from the coast, after which, in the presence of official representatives from the customs and owners of ICT 1202, they solemnly threw overboard and sent the computer to the bottom of the Indian Ocean. This is probably where ICT 1202 rests to this day: about nine kilometers east of Kilindini harbor under several hundred meters of salt water. It is a pity that the first real computer in East Africa was not stored in the museum.

During the transition of East Africa to independence, three computers of a new generation were ordered: the ICT 1500 model. Despite the name, they were made not in England, but in the USA, where they were known as RCA 301. Scientists from Great Britain struggled to complete the development their own project of second-generation computers, but they had to abandon their plans and start working again due to the amazing efficiency of transistors, which quickly made any lamp computer obsolete. Therefore, the British, who wanted to win a little time, signed a contract with RCA for the right to resell the computer model 301 called "ICT 1500".

Two cars went to Kenya at EAR & H and EAP & L. Moreover, EAP & L rented a computer for only 12 hours a day. At night, it was used to carry out small work by other organizations that paid hourly fees for using the device. The third went to Tanzania, in the city of Dar es Salaam, where it was used by the East African Department of Customs and Excise Taxes for accounting.

In addition to switching to transistors, these machines differed from previous generations of devices in that they had a method of recording / storing data, which was not limited to bulky and slow punch cards. In addition to the card reader and printer, the devices used magnetic tapes that can memorize the same amount of information as tens of thousands of punched cards. In addition, the tapes were much faster. While punch cards offered reads ranging from 100 (ICT 1202) to 600 (ICT 1500) characters per minute, magnetic tapes were capable of reading and writing 10,000 characters per second. With the seal, things were the same. The ICT 1202 could print about 100 lines per minute, and the ICT 1500 printer (created by Anelex) could print 1,000 lines per minute.

There was a computer in the Ugandan city of Kampala. Initially, an electromechanical punch card device owned by an energy company was upgraded to a more efficient transistor machine. It was the ICT 1004. It, like the ICT 1500 computers, was also a “renamed” American machine (UNIVAC 1004), which ICT sold under its own brand.

The device did not have magnetic tape storage. It was limited to the ability to read punch cards and print. The ICT 1004 was programmed through the control panel, and not any programming language. The main advantages of the computer over its predecessors were increased speed and reliability.

Until 1965 and even slightly later, the ICT 1500 in Nairobi and the ICT 1004 in Kampala continued to operate. They stopped using only when the devices failed. And the car in Es Salaam disappeared during the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution. How and by whom she was abducted is unknown. But later it was possible to establish that the computer came to China, where it was disassembled to the screw in order to study and use it as a training tool for the development of its computer industry.

What else can be useful to read on the Cloud4Y blog

→ How the bank “broke”
→ Personal privacy? No, they didn’t hear
→ The web at the bottom of the glass, or that combines American whiskey and science
→Diagnostics of network connections on a virtual EDGE router
→ Anonymizing data does not guarantee your complete anonymity

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