In Lancashire we did have the 'CEU Suite' of programmes mentioned below, which ran in BASIC on a text file that had been created from our optical coincidence cards etc. This  was already established (by Adrian Olivier?) within one of the old 'county' units, the Cumbria and Lancs Archaeology Unit, when I joined in as part of an MSC team in 1984.  I don't know if we can beat the 1979 date below but they'd certainly been up to something for a while before I got there.  The MSC project had purchased two Sirius 8086 processor PCs, one of which had a famously unreliable hard disc, the other was a twin-floppy (3.5 inch) machine – one for the programme (e.g. WordStar – a whole word-processing programme on a single 360Kb disc!).  I did discover an 8-inch floppy disc in a cupboard, but was never able to get it read on anything so pointing to something earlier.  Jamie Quartermaine of CLAU was also using small portable computers in this period (the PX-8 and something similar - a HP-??)  to calculate up his survey coordinates.  They stored data on 'dictaphone' type mini cassettes and output data via a built-in paper-roll printer like a cash machine.

 

We too moved onto the Superfile system and I grew adept at using a hexadecimal editor to find and fix corrupt control codes, as well as backing up the hard disc every evening onto sets of floppies – at least that way we would only lose a day's work at a time.  I also remember the heady thrill of persuading the MSC to buy me a real IBM PC-AT with a 80286 processor and a massive 1Mb of RAM, which was delivered and set up by a pair of genuine IBM Computer Scientists.  I think it cost £2,500 – not much less than my annual salary at the time - and ran fantastically well when compared to the Sirius junk.  I can't recall if it had a colour display or not though, I suspect not.

 

I did find a way in the early 1990s of downloading x and y coordinate data into a graphics programme called 'Poster' that ran on the Lancaster University mainframe.  It had been designed by the University computing service for drawing front covers for reports and after digitising various backgrounds to use with it I could produce distribution maps.  I did wonder about claiming it was the first archaeological GIS, as you could attach attribute data to the points and use those properties to change their display on the screen, but to be truthful it was more like previewing a picture.

 

Ah nostalgia …

 

 

 

When I was working for Don Benson at the Dyfed Archaeological Trust in c 1979, he was experimenting with using a PC for the SMR, run by Charlie Stenger . As I remember, it was a Research Machines 380Z, with 2 8ins floppy disc drives and miniscule RAM. It used a programme created by Joe Jeffries of the CEU , and it could generate lists and gazetteers.

 

I moved to Shropshire in 1982 and in 1984 we acquired a PC running Wordstar word processing. I  created records in a set format which in conjunction with Joe Jeffries’s GSLEX system and a commercial package called Supersort, could generate Gazetteers and Indexes to print out.  This was succeeded by Superfile, which we never migrated to, and then, when our PCs were stolen in c 1988, we moved the data to the STAIRS library cataloguing system which ran on a mainframe.

 

 

Penny Ward

Senior Historic Environment Records Officer

Historic Environment Team

Shropshire Council

 

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