Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Kutt's career took off when he joined Honeywell Controls Ltd
in 1959. His natural talent for salesmanship and his enthusiasm
for technological advancement, coupled with his understand-
ing of market needs, shortly made him the company's top sales-
man in western Canada. That success later put him in charge
of all Honeywell's computer activities in eastern Canada. The
Honeywell experience would prove invaluable in future ven-
tures which required attracting talented personnel, obtaining
development capital, and securing crucial sales contracts.
But at thirty-two, after six years at Honeywell, he realized
that he would never be able to satisfy his research and de-
velopment ambitions if he stayed with the company. In 1965,
in a rather sudden move, he gave up his lucrative position at
Honeywell, and joined Queen's University as a professor of
mathematics. Queen's - one of Canada's oldest and best-known
universities - was far behind other Canadian universities in the
area of academic computing. Kutt was hired to change that. “I
had carte blanche to just get things going, the least of which was
to get the professors to use the [university's] computer and not
be afraid.”
When Kutt arrived at Queen's, the university's computer re-
sources comprised an
IBM
1620 Data Processing System inter-
faced with a printer and a punch card input/output device, most
likely an
IBM
1622 Card Read Punch. The 1620 was
IBM
's
popular early computer for small businesses, academic research,
and engineering applications. The computer itself wasn't par-
ticularly slow. On the other hand, the process of data and pro-
gram entry into the computer certainly was. Kutt recalls stu-
dents and faculty lining up in the university's computer center
to have their computer programs executed.
But executing a program on the 1620 computer wasn't a
simple matter. First, a user's program and data had to be con-
verted into a deck of paper cards - punch cards - using the
IBM
1622 Card Read Punch. The computer console's typewriter was
used to type data or program lines, with each key-press resulting
