15 May
2007
15 May
'07
2:44 p.m.
From: "Rod Smallwood" <RodSmallwood at
mail.ediconsulting.co.uk>
Well now let me see now I left School for College in 1964. My major
subjects were Industrial Electronics and Computing.
We were taken to Harwell Research centre to see 'The' Computer. It was
an ICL 1900 series system. It took up three floors of a substantial
building. Input on the top floor (80col Cards and papertape).
Processing
and storage on the middle floor and output on the ground floor. Had to
be that way or the vibration from the line printers would have shaken
the building to pieces.
I remember it was called Atlas and even had an operating system called
George III. So that's just over 40 years ago. In computer terms
certainly vintage if not veteran.
Hi Rod,
I think you have mixed up two different systems. The Ferranti Atlas
(later ICT/ICL Atlas) was in a custom built building, I understand
the CPU occupied two floors, and yes there was one at Harwell I've
been told.
I would expect that Harwell also had at least one ICT/ICL 1900, and
that would indeed run the George 3 multi access system.
I did my computer science degree at Queen Mary College (University of
London) and we had a ICL 1905E, upgraded to a 1904S which ran George
2 batch processing and the Maximop multi access system. Later I used
a 1906 (S?) at the Royal Aircraft Establishment and it used either
George 3 or George 4, and I was relieved to find that all the Maximop
commands worked on it.
When I was in the sixth form we visited the computer centre at the
NatWest tower - huge floors - IIRC, one floor had nothing but IBM
CPUs (probably 370s - this was 1969) and other static electronics,
one floor had all the storage - magnetic tapes, discs, and juke box
like machines which picked up strips of magnetic tape. Another floor
had the hard peripherals - card readers, line printers and a massive
document reader with a curved 'retina' on top about 20 feet across
where all the optical sensors were. Another floor had all the cheque
reading machines, the operators were moaning about people stapling
their cheques and the staples getting caught in the works. At that
time a random 2% of the cheques were also processed manually for
quality assurance purposes, and presumably to prevent fraud. That day
was the first I heard of the fraction of a penny (or cent) scam,
where all interest payments were rounded down and all the fractions
of a penny credited to the programmer's account.
The same day I visited the University of London's central computer
centre (as opposed to the individual college's private ones). They
had a CDC 7600 and one operator was using a terminal to send messages
to chat up a girl operating one of the remote stations which fed the
7600 with punched card data and printed the results. A very early
form of Internet chat room you might say.
Roger
Owner of a ICT 1301 built 1962