The "Pre-Lax Report" Period

During the 1970s, almost all of the supercomputers installed were found in government installations and were not generally accessible to the university research community. For those researchers who could not

gain access to these supercomputers, this was a frustrating period. A few found it was relatively easy to obtain time on supercomputers in Europe, especially in England and West Germany.

By the end of the decade, a number of studies, proposals, and other attempts were done to generate funds to make available large-scale computational facilities for some of the university research community. All of this was happening during a period when U.S. policy was tightening rather than relaxing the mechanisms for acquiring large-scale computing facilities.