Brampton Centennial Secondary School student council treasurer Arnis Mitrevics liked to play the popular card game blackjack, according to a 1969 Guardian article.

“Not in a gray, beer-fumed, cigar smoke haze tinged blue by four-letter cusswords muttered to an obbligato of crisply rustling banknotes,” the article noted, “but a sterile Sheridan College computer room where even the heating system’s explosively violent rumblings are muted to a dull roar.”

The article mentioned that Mitrevics “caught the computer bug” while attending a University of Waterloo math weekend. He later taught himself to use Sheridan’s IBM 360-30 mainframe computer. The machine at Sheridan didn’t know to “stick at 20,” as any good blackjack player knows to do, but Mitrevics felt that Waterloo’s more powerful IBM 360-75 system would have had enough memory to figure that out. The Sheridan machine printed its own version of playing “cards” as numbers printed on paper, one-by-one.

At the time, Sheridan College was located in the old Brampton High School building.

Mitrevics used the system at Waterloo for a January 1969 school dance, letting the computer play matchmaker.

By the way, the IBM 360-30 computer was introduced in 1964 with a list price of $133,000. By today’s standards it would be a rather primitive computer system, being equipped with only 24,000 bytes of processing memory; roughly equivalent to .02 megabytes.

Peel Art Gallery, Museum and Archives (PAMA) is located at 9 Wellington St. E., Brampton, and parking is available at any of the nearby parking garages. For more information, visit pama.peelregion.ca.

Throwback Thursday is provided by Peel Art Gallery, Museum and Archives. PAMA is a place to explore, learn and make connections about Peel Region’s culture and heritage.