Country's First Computer
It was huge – and expensive - but the Government's first computer was a sight to behold for civil servants in 1965.
IN 50 years of independence the nation has seen many milestones. Among them is the installation of the National Electricity Board's mainframe computer 42 years ago.
The board, now known as Tenaga Nasional Bhd, was the first government department to go high-tech with a computer system.
It was 1965 and the mainframe occupied a room at the NEB headquarters in Kuala Lumpur, which had just been opened by the then Prime Minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman.
High-tech novelty: The IBM 1440 that the NEB installed in 1965. About 1,000 government officials who came to see it being unveiled were treated to a tour of the EDP section.
Huge as it was, the IBM 1440 only had a storage capacity of 8 kilobytes. In comparison, a desktop personal computer of this era has a storage capacity of 320 gigabytes – roughly 40 million times that of the mainframe.
Also, the mainframe had cost the princely sum of RM700,000, while the more modern and more powerful PC would set you back about RM3,000 today.
Razali Awang, 52, chief information officer at TNB, said the IBM 1440 was the height of computing power in its day and was installed to do the payroll for NEB's 7,000 employees.
It was such a novelty that a group of about 1,000 NEB employees and government officials came to see it being unveiled, and were treated to a tour of the electronic data processing (EDP) section of the building.
Card reader
Mohd Hanafi Abdul Jabbar, 51, senior manager of regional operations at TNB, remembers the mainframe as a huge cabinet that was adorned with tape spools and diodes.
"If you've seen the computers in the old James Bond films, that's exactly what it looked like," said Hanafi, who was just 22 years old when he joined NEB as a clerk.
Although he hadn't yet joined NEB when the board acquired the IBM 1440, its complexity was still being talked about when he started working there.
"The stories I heard about it were like legends," he said. "It took two engineers and three other NEB personnel to put it together."
And he also recalls that the team had to read and re-read the user manual several times over to ensure they were setting up the mainframe correctly.
Commands on the IBM 1440 were delivered using punch cards – large cards with holes running in columns and rows.
It was a tedious job that required the programmers to write their programs on coding sheets before sending them for key-punching. One simple program could take up to several sheets, which had to be arranged in sequence before going for key-punching.
Hanafi remembers that there were times when the cards fell and scattered all over the floor. "You were in trouble then ... it was a real nightmare to have to pick them up off the floor and then rearrange them in the correct order," he said.
The commands were written in various computer languages, such as Fortran, Cobol or PL1. A Cobol program would require at least 2,000 cards.
"We thought of playing a prank on some programmers," said Hanaf
"We wanted to rearrange the cards in the mainframe, so that the poor programmers would be tearing their hair out wondering why the program wasn't running as it should," he laughed.
Hanafi: It was just like those in the old James Bond films.
But they never did, Hanafi insisted.
Steep curve
Retiree Fong Ah Ngoh, 82, who was EDP manager at NEB, has recorded his experiences with the IBM 1440 in an article in TNB's internal publication, People Behind the Lights, issued in 1988.
He said NEB decided to buy the mainframe when it realised that calculating and keeping track of the employee payroll manually was taking too long and required too much effort.
Before the mainframe was shipped here, Fong and colleague Yong Siew Kong were sent to Australia on Colombo Plan scholarships to take computer courses to prepare for NEB's computerisation exercise.
(The Colombo Plan was an international economic organisation created in 1951 in a co-operative attempt to strengthen the economic and social development of the nations of South-East Asia and the Pacific.)
This was while government servants in Australia were also getting involved in computerisation programmes, "so it was a good opportunity for us to learn with them," said Fong in his article.
According to him, setting up the mainframe and learning to perform the electronic data-processing work required a lot of patience because there was a steep learning curve.
"Despite the training we received in Australia, we still had a lot to learn (when we came home)," Fong was quoted in the article.
Khor Heng Yong, 55 who joined NEB in 1974 as a systems analyst, said they had to learn computer languages if they wanted to use the mainframe.
"I think only Hanafi and I know how to input commands in Fortran now," he said.
To get his staff up to speed, Fong had to conduct computer courses every day for three months; outstation employees were brought to NEB headquarters for the courses.
But not just anyone could work in the new department. EDP employees at NEB were selected using an aptitude test and they were selected from various parts of the country.
These employees were promoted from clerks to computer operators and programmers. School-leavers, as well as daughters of NEB employees, who were looking for jobs, were offered the entry-level position of key punchers, said Fong's article.
Closure
TNB is currently using IBM's P-series servers which offer up to 32 gigabytes of storage capacity, which can be easily increased when needed.
Its investment in information technology has also grown since the days of the IBM 1440, and now amounts to RM2mil annually. One result is the meter reader who can print out your electricity bill immediately.
So what happened to the IBM 1440?
"Last I heard, one part that was thrown out with the rest of the machine sometime during or before the early 80s, is being used as a door in someone's house," Hanafi said.
It was huge – and expensive - but the Government's first computer was a sight to behold for civil servants in 1965.
IN 50 years of independence the nation has seen many milestones. Among them is the installation of the National Electricity Board's mainframe computer 42 years ago.
The board, now known as Tenaga Nasional Bhd, was the first government department to go high-tech with a computer system.
It was 1965 and the mainframe occupied a room at the NEB headquarters in Kuala Lumpur, which had just been opened by the then Prime Minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman.
High-tech novelty: The IBM 1440 that the NEB installed in 1965. About 1,000 government officials who came to see it being unveiled were treated to a tour of the EDP section.
Huge as it was, the IBM 1440 only had a storage capacity of 8 kilobytes. In comparison, a desktop personal computer of this era has a storage capacity of 320 gigabytes – roughly 40 million times that of the mainframe.
Also, the mainframe had cost the princely sum of RM700,000, while the more modern and more powerful PC would set you back about RM3,000 today.
Razali Awang, 52, chief information officer at TNB, said the IBM 1440 was the height of computing power in its day and was installed to do the payroll for NEB's 7,000 employees.
It was such a novelty that a group of about 1,000 NEB employees and government officials came to see it being unveiled, and were treated to a tour of the electronic data processing (EDP) section of the building.
Card reader
Mohd Hanafi Abdul Jabbar, 51, senior manager of regional operations at TNB, remembers the mainframe as a huge cabinet that was adorned with tape spools and diodes.
"If you've seen the computers in the old James Bond films, that's exactly what it looked like," said Hanafi, who was just 22 years old when he joined NEB as a clerk.
Although he hadn't yet joined NEB when the board acquired the IBM 1440, its complexity was still being talked about when he started working there.
"The stories I heard about it were like legends," he said. "It took two engineers and three other NEB personnel to put it together."
And he also recalls that the team had to read and re-read the user manual several times over to ensure they were setting up the mainframe correctly.
Commands on the IBM 1440 were delivered using punch cards – large cards with holes running in columns and rows.
It was a tedious job that required the programmers to write their programs on coding sheets before sending them for key-punching. One simple program could take up to several sheets, which had to be arranged in sequence before going for key-punching.
Hanafi remembers that there were times when the cards fell and scattered all over the floor. "You were in trouble then ... it was a real nightmare to have to pick them up off the floor and then rearrange them in the correct order," he said.
The commands were written in various computer languages, such as Fortran, Cobol or PL1. A Cobol program would require at least 2,000 cards.
"We thought of playing a prank on some programmers," said Hanaf
"We wanted to rearrange the cards in the mainframe, so that the poor programmers would be tearing their hair out wondering why the program wasn't running as it should," he laughed.
Hanafi: It was just like those in the old James Bond films.
But they never did, Hanafi insisted.
Steep curve
Retiree Fong Ah Ngoh, 82, who was EDP manager at NEB, has recorded his experiences with the IBM 1440 in an article in TNB's internal publication, People Behind the Lights, issued in 1988.
He said NEB decided to buy the mainframe when it realised that calculating and keeping track of the employee payroll manually was taking too long and required too much effort.
Before the mainframe was shipped here, Fong and colleague Yong Siew Kong were sent to Australia on Colombo Plan scholarships to take computer courses to prepare for NEB's computerisation exercise.
(The Colombo Plan was an international economic organisation created in 1951 in a co-operative attempt to strengthen the economic and social development of the nations of South-East Asia and the Pacific.)
This was while government servants in Australia were also getting involved in computerisation programmes, "so it was a good opportunity for us to learn with them," said Fong in his article.
According to him, setting up the mainframe and learning to perform the electronic data-processing work required a lot of patience because there was a steep learning curve.
"Despite the training we received in Australia, we still had a lot to learn (when we came home)," Fong was quoted in the article.
Khor Heng Yong, 55 who joined NEB in 1974 as a systems analyst, said they had to learn computer languages if they wanted to use the mainframe.
"I think only Hanafi and I know how to input commands in Fortran now," he said.
To get his staff up to speed, Fong had to conduct computer courses every day for three months; outstation employees were brought to NEB headquarters for the courses.
But not just anyone could work in the new department. EDP employees at NEB were selected using an aptitude test and they were selected from various parts of the country.
These employees were promoted from clerks to computer operators and programmers. School-leavers, as well as daughters of NEB employees, who were looking for jobs, were offered the entry-level position of key punchers, said Fong's article.
Closure
TNB is currently using IBM's P-series servers which offer up to 32 gigabytes of storage capacity, which can be easily increased when needed.
Its investment in information technology has also grown since the days of the IBM 1440, and now amounts to RM2mil annually. One result is the meter reader who can print out your electricity bill immediately.
So what happened to the IBM 1440?
"Last I heard, one part that was thrown out with the rest of the machine sometime during or before the early 80s, is being used as a door in someone's house," Hanafi said.
