Real Life Varian user: story told by Lawrie Bradly

On 26th of February 2009, the conservator, Jean Huens, received the following mail from Lawrie Bradly.
It gives a good idea of how Varians were used in the "real world"

G'day,

At a loose end this afternoon I Googled "Varian V73" and came up with your webpage "Computer museum: The Varian and its users."
Why on earth would I Google "Varian V73", you might ask?
Well the truth is, to try to remember something of my lost youth.

In 1970 I was a member of the Victoria (State) Police force in Australia - a 'First Constable' cruising around in V8 Fords, but recently married and a bit dissatisfied with my job prospects. However, an opportunity arose when the force decided to appoint 6 members as trainee systems analyst/programmers as the initial members of a new Computer Systems Division (CSD). I was one of the people appointed.

Anyway, to cut a long story short and after many delays and disappointments about getting funding for a computer, in 1974 we finally got two Varian V73s. People from Varian and their applications software developer, who knew what they were doing, managed to get some work out of us dumb coppers and we developed an on-line enquiry system to access stolen motor-vehicle records. It was called the PATROL System (Police Access to Records On-Line).

It was written in Varian assembler code, which I remember was called DASMR. I had forgotten until I visited your website that the operating system was VORTEX, but do remember becoming reasonably competent in octal notation. Without having much programming talent I was able to write working programs using assembler macros written by the Varian applications software people: just plugging the correct parameters into the macros was hard enough for me.

The attached photo is of me in about 1976 as a Brevet Senior Sergeant/Acting Inspector in Charge of the CSD boring the pants of the bloke in the suit who was the Minister for Police (Chief Secretary) on an official visit to the computer room, telling him all about PATROL.

The Varians were duplicated (Systems A & B) to run 24 hours a day 7 days a week with 99% up-time, and bloody near achieved this over the couple of years they were in service. The main hardware was housed in four cabinets.
The paper tapes to boot them up are on the shelf under the desk. One of the four tape drives is on the right behind the sergeant/operations manager.
One of the Univac enquiry terminals and the card reader are on the bench to the left of the picture. The Assistant Commissioner of Police to my right is leaning on one of the two disc drives that had multi-level discs that fitted into what we thought looked like Italian cake covers, for loading and removal. The teletype consoles used to get hot and the hot oil smelt of the industrial revolution.

Years later having moved out of the Force, I saw the B system teletype derelict on a shelf in the Forensic Science Laboratory when I was doing a management review of the Victoria State Chemistry Laboratories.

I should have made an offer to buy it!

Regards,

Lawrie Bradly