The Queen's University Social Monitoring System (QSMS) was written when I was working on the Social Malaise Project in Queen's University from 1971 to 1973. The project had collected data on 20,563 individual cases of social deprivation which we needed to map. I therefore began writing a series of Fortran programs which could be used to manipulate the data and draw crude maps. The QSMS was essentially a suite of programs which could be used to process large datasets and save the results in a format which could be used as the input by other modules. The formats used by the QSMS modules could be read by an early version of SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) which we used for most of the statistical analysis.
In those days, all the data and, indeed, the program itself had to be transferred to punched cards. There were no magnetic devices for storing the data or program files - so everything had to be stored on punched cards which could be fed into the computer using a card reader. The data and programs for the Social Malaise Project occupied somewhere in the region of 20-25 boxes, each of which I reckon must have contained about 1,000 cards. We had to transcribe the input data and the program source code onto special coding sheets which were submitted to trained operators to be punched up. Each card was in fact punched twice to check for errors. I often wonder what happened to the punched card operators when magnetic storage devices became available only a few years later. They presumably had to find new occupations, but by that time they must have been near enough brain dead from tedium. I cannot think of a more boring job than being a punched card operator.
The computer could be programmed to output data onto punched cards. This allowed us, for example, to write a module to count the number of cases in each area and then output the results onto punched cards. These punched cards could then be used as the input for another module which might divide one set of counts by another to create rates, which could themselves be output onto punched cards. These cards could be used as the input to SPSS. Results from the SPSS analysis (e.g. correlation matrices, regression residuals, factor scores) could themselves be output onto punched cards for further analysis.
One of the earliest mapping programs - Symap - was available in America, but it was not yet available in Ireland. I therefore had to write modules to map the data. The QSMS had a total of four mapping modules (called Map1, Map2, Map3 and Map4). Map1 and Map2 mapped data by grid squares, whereas Map3 and Map4 mapped the data by irregular SMP (Social Malaise Project) zones. All the maps were output on a line printer and different tones were produced by overprinting different combinations of letters. Solid black squares, for example, were created by overprinting the letters O, A, H and V on top of one another. Light tones might be produced by printing full-stops. Line printers printed 10 characters to the inch horizontally and either 6 or 8 rows of text vertically, so it was a relatively simple matter to draw the maps in the correct dimensions.
My first effort was a total disaster, although I must admit I was very proud of it at the time. I decided to map each 200 metre grid square as a 1 inch square (i.e. 10 characters by 8). Each 1 kilometre grid square, comprised of 25 200 metre grid squares, was printed on a separate page. These 1 kilometre grid squares then had to be cut out and stuck together with sellotape to create a map of the entire city. The problem was this map measured several feet across, so to detect any pattern it had to be viewed from a distance of about 20 feet feet. However, unless the line printer happened to have a new ribbon in it at the time of printing, the ink was too faint to see anything at all from a distance of 20 feet. Also, the likelihood of sellotaping all the 1 kilometre squares in the right sequence and the right way up was slight, so I quickly realised that what we need was Map2. This managed to display the whole city on a single page. I cannot remember what Map3 looked like, but Map4 produced results which were almost presentable (see illustration).
I think it would stretching things to claim that the QSMS was Ireland's first GIS. However, it did contain a number of elements which one might expect to find in a modern GIS, and in retrospect I believe it was very advanced for its time. I am also reasonably certain that the maps drawn by the QSMS were the first computer-drawn maps in Ireland. If anyone knows of any other computer drawn maps from that era (i.e 1971) please contact me at dennis.pringle@may.ie
Return to the Programs page
Return to the Social Malaise Project page