British Computers

On Wed, 5 Sep 2007, David Cantrell wrote: In terms of British minis there were at British Gas in Leeds (England) in the 80s a system made by Cossor Electronics (also made scopes and valve radios etc) that was based around a TMS9900, finished in a very fetching orange with flicky-switches operator panel. It had Pertec disk drives each with a separate 19" 2U 'formatter' unit (controller?), remote graphics heads that had some kind of controller (kb in, and RGB out to big 20 inch or so CCTV-style monitors) hooked-up to the CPU by extended serial links. It also had banks and banks of modems, and operated in some sort of dual config with hardware watchdogs. It performed 'grid control' for the distribution of gas in the North East of England, via UHF radio links to inhouse designed (hw+sw) telemetry 'outstations' that could open and close valves, control compressors etc, and report back temp, pressure and so on. When I arrived at British Gas as a trainee it was sat uncoupled in the corner of the workshop, and had been replaced by a VAXserver cluster with satellite VS2000 nodes as workstations. I used to get in early to hook-up the Cossor and play around with it. It made a real racket as the bearings were gone in a Pertec drive, and so my elders and betters would throw tools at me on arrival until I powered it all down! Never seen or heard of a Cossor computer since, but I did hear at the time (early 90s) that Heathrow airport had the same systems still in use. This has also just reminded me of another very cool device we had at BG. A thing called a 'Radac' that was essentially a metal drum a bit smaller than a can of coke. With tracks of mag tape inside, a motor attached to the outside, and a mechanical selector to move the heads. These were part of alarm systems that had a mechanical dialler, and would dial you up if at a remote radio site a burglar was detected, fire alarm went off, or backup genny kicked in etc. You'd get a call with "ALARM! GARROWBY HILL! FIRE!" or something... I wish I'd hung on to some Radacs when the system was replaced! Andrew