What is (or was) The Bayview Club?

The Bayview Club (now defunct) was a club with automatic membership for a certain class of people - namely those employees of Control Data Corporation who worked at the facility at 215 Moffett Park Drive, in Sunnyvale California.

Usually referred to by its internal code of SVLOPS, this location housed a number of software development projects over the years, the most famous (notorious?) of which included:

• SCOPE - The operating system for the world-renowned CDC 6000 series of computers. (Allegedly the name derived from Sunnyvale's Compendium Of Programming Errors)

• Intercom - The "Timesharing" adjunct to this operating system that supported remote interactive terminal users

• E/I 200 - The "Remote Batch" adjunct to this operating system that supported the use of remote card-readers and printers.

• The Fortran Compilers - there were two of these;
  • RUN designed primarily for University and student use. Optimized for fast compiling but not necessarily the best for execution speed of the compiled programs.
  • FTN designed for optimized execution-speed of compiled programs - but not necessarily very fast at doing the actual compilation.

• The COBOL Compiler. Yes - generation of fast in-line code to handle all varieties of character-handling and massive high-speed input/output requirements. On a machine designed for floating-point number-crunching but without benefit of native character-handling instructions.

• 6RM - later renamed as CRM. This was the "Record Manager" that handled record-level input/output for application programs via an eclectic set of access methods. These were initially developed to support a number of "special systems" (see below) including multiple varieties of Sequential, Hashed, Indexed, Multi-keyed, Bit-vector based, and a number of other esoteric technologies.

• CDCNET - what today we would call a Network Operating System. A ground-breaking advance in the transition from from the cetralized mainframe-and-multiplexor architecture to the world of real "networks" with multiple intelligent nodes and supporting a wide variety of protocols.

• Special Systems - these projects built what were referred to (with a nudge, nudge, wink, wink) as "special applications". Only people with a "need to know" had any idea what these were. They were handled in "the bunker" inside a Faraday cage and behind a massive steel door. Names such as Axel, Rover, and R.Freda were occasionally heard in the hallways.

The club was founded around 1970 with the move to this new building in Sunnyvale. (Prior to this, software developmemt was performed at the Porter Drive facility in Palo Alto.) The club was never formally shut down - it started to fade into the sunset after the move to a new facility (on Patrick Henry in Santa Clara) around 1988 and the final event (where the last remaining funds derived from recycling were invested in four large pizzas and accompanying sodas) occured in the Orleans Drive facility in Sunnyvale some time around 1999.

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