I first began working with a Honeywell Level 6 Computer in 1980.  It was great machine, for which I have many fond memories.  I am forwarding the CPU and main memory board of the system, which I kept for sentimental reasons.  Hope I have found a good home for them.

In 1980 I had just started as a programmer trainee in a branch of the NY State government that regulated the insurance industry.  I was the first person hired into a programming title, everyone else were insurance examiners who had taken a few programming courses.   When I joined the Level 6 had just been purchased, and was sitting, turned off, in a conference room that had been converted into “the computer room”.  That consisted of knocking out one panel of the wall and putting a large fan in.  No separate air conditioning, no raised floor, none of the other niceties you would expect in a computer room. 

Everyone else was working on their projects, which consisted primarily of writing programs to cross-check the accounting on filings from insurance companies.  We would all write programs on coding forms, then punch them on one of two punch cards machines.  When it came time to run them, you would pack them up in a metal box and take the elevator down to the 44th floor (we were on the 80th floor of World Trade Center #2) to the office of the state agency that ran the mainframes.  There your cards were read, your program run, and you could pick up printer output from your previous runs.  There were no terminals or printers for these mainframes on our floor, so this was the day's routine.

I had a couple of minor assignments on punch-card based mainframe programs but had plenty of extra time, so I asked if I could start experimenting with the Level 6.  That is when the fun began, as it became my exclusive domain.

Our system was a five foot high black cabinet with an open reel tape drive built into the front.  Next to it was our disk drives, two stack drives that resembled a washing machine in which you could change the disk by loading in a 5 platter disk pack that resembled a cake box.  Each drive held 80 megabytes which seems hilariously small today but was consistent with the technology of the time.  Eventually we added a “massive” 1.2 gig drive, another washing machine with a 10 platter cake box to load.  A line printer and 5 black and white terminals rounded out the installation. 

My goal was to write the first interactive systems to speed up some of the Department's administrative functions, which were woefully manual and backlogged.  After studying the manuals and experimenting with coding, I got permission to put together a system for automating the management of no-fault arbitration forums and then eventually consumer complaints and investigations.  Consumer complaints were particularly gratifying, as the time to get out basic acknowledgements and inquiry letters for a new case dropped from six months to three days, and the case backlog and average time to resolution plummeted. 

These were very exciting times since I was the only systems programmer and application developer on the Level 6 for the first 3 years or so.  Very exciting for a 21 year old.  The two statewide shared mainframe systems were an IBM and a Honeywell, so naturally we started calling the mainframe “Big Honeywell” and the Level 6 “Little Honeywell”.  I was always lobbying to put things on Little Honeywell instead of the mainframes. 

We coded apps for the Level 6 in COBOL (it did support other languages, but this is what we used).  COBOL is not the first language that comes to mind when you think of interactive systems, but it had a bunch of calls that let you manipulate the screen, and it worked surprisingly well. Current coders would be amazed at just how much could be done with a system with so little power (by current standards), so little memory (I think the main memory board was only 2 meg) and so little disk.  But everything was character based and did not need all the resources that Windows and all the other graphic based products would eventually demand.  I even was given a copy of a character-based “Space Invaders” game for it, by one of the Honeywell salespeople.    You “shot” periods at the descending ships made of asterisks.  As you may remember in Space Invaders, from time to time a flying sauce would go across the top of the screen that you could shoot for extra points.  In this character-based version, it was composed of the name “Doris” in multiple parentheses.  We would all speculate on whether Doris was someone the developer adored, who he wanted to honor by putting in his game, or someone he despised, who he wanted to make everyone shoot at.

By the time time the Level 6 (by then renamed the DPS 6 by Honeywell) was retired, she had been living in a proper computer room with 25 remote terminals scattered around the Department running an assortment of interactive apps that I, and by then a couple of other staff, had developed.  A true workhorse for its time.

Along the way the Department had become dependent enough on the Level 6 that it paid for a complete system upgrade.  That included replacing the CPU board and the main memory board.  I was somewhat shocked that the two replaced boards just got tossed in the trash.   So I fished them out and kept them as mementos.  They have been in my closet for nearly 40 years now.  I hope that the RICM will be able to put them to some use.

Best regards,

David Schorr