18 Feb
2006
18 Feb
'06
2:20 p.m.
From: "Paul Williams" <paul at frixxon.co.uk
It is scary to think that it is nearly twenty years
since I worked at
the UK Atomic Energy Authority at Culham Labs, Oxfordshire, the home of
GHOST. There was a Software Applications Group, and I worked my sandwich
year there from July 1987 to August 1988,
That ties in nicely - I was at Trent Polytechnic (now Nottingham Trent
University) from '88 to '90.
with about three other
students. One of them got to work on GHOST development, whereas I only
had to use it to update an accounting package for the PRIME network.
COST3D took the numbers from PRIMROSE (a tortuous acronym) to produce
some pretty graphs to demonstrate the trend away from using the
minicomputer networks and mainframes (Primes and VAXen at Culham, and
the IBM 3084Q and Cray 2 at Harwell) towards workstations (sexy black
Whitechapel MG-1s).
That sounds like an interesting set up! We had the VAX cluster (don't know
what machines were involved), with VT100 and Tek terminals, as well as a
small number of PC's (286 / 386) and some Apollo Domain 3500's (used for PCB
layout work). We also used Motorola D2 training systems for machine code lab
work (once you learnt how to program at a 1's and 0's level, you were
allowed to use the cross-assembler).
IIRC, GHOST was written in FORTRAN, as most of our
applications were,
and created and maintained by a Mr Prior (I'm not being formal -- I
can't remember his name, despite Google's hint that his initials are WAJ).
That's interesting - I only knew the package as an end user.
Unfortunately, my Industrial Training Report doesn't provide any more
details, and I can't find the few graphs from that time that I printed
from one of the Tektronix terminals. No software either, sorry!
Somewhere I have prinouts of the plots we created, but they could be
anywhere now, the only definite is that I haven't thrown out my old college
notes!
Jim.