RIP Raymond Bird: Designer of UK's first mass-produced business computer dies aged 101 Raymond Bird, who developed the UK's first mass-produced business computer, the Hollerith Electronic Computer (HEC), has died at the digitally apropos age of 101. The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) announced Bird's passing. A museum spokesperson, who was not immediately available to provide further details, told The …
Good call. One of the Wright brothers made it 1948, so saw huge multi engined bombers carrying many tons and possibly even jet aircraft before he died. Sometimes we forget the changes the pioneers saw and just how vast those changes were over such a short period of time. It's probably even more amazing for them than for us "normal" people who have also lived through enormous change and advancement.
"ARA and RAE, Bedford (they had two for wind tunnel applications)"
I find it utterly remarkable that these folk were doing any sort of computational fluid dynamics with a machine whose logic ran to 1000 odd vacuum tubes† which were little more than glorified incandescent light bulbs.
I am old enough to have mucked about with thermionic valves and realise 1000 of the blighters would be equivalent to herding cats.
These men and women were the giants on whose shoulders we stand and whose legacy we hold in trust.
† According to WikiP 6J6 dual triodes with data sheet ;)
I still muck about with vacuum tubes, or valves in British parlance, for guitar amplifiers. That application uses just a handful in each device - the amount of heat 1,000 of the things would produce is astonishing. Although it does lead to a great anecdote about the female operators of the Colossus computers at Bletchley Park working in just their underwear because of the heat!
Not quite a computer one, but I have a 2.5kW triode valve (vacuum tube) on my bookshelf. I came from one of the audio amplifiers in a Redifusion cable TV distribution hut in Bristol (back around 1975). I keep it to remind my MacBook where its M1Pro chip came from, so to behave itself :)
Yep, when I was 14 or 15 I got to go to EE's Stafford Labs to program a DEUCE computer as a prize for a school essay on computing (gissa job El Reg?).
It was a blazing hot summer combined with the heat of hundreds(?) of thermionic valves created an inferno. The only method of cooling was to have all the windows wide open. Not good for thermionic health and men in white coats went round with trolleys replacing those who had blown. Later I got a holiday job with GKN as an ICT 1301 computer operator for £4-8s-6p a week. Didn't know it was Bird design but what a transition from the DEUCE. Core and drum memory and those new-fangled transistors. A proper control panel with knobs and integrated card reader. And only one ICT engineer to keep it working.
Clearly the inspiration for the early-1970s integrated ICL 2903 engineer-free small business machine which succeeded the unintegrated scaled down ICL 1901/A.
The ICL 2903 was built using 2900 hardware: it was actually a 2900 DFC (disk file controller) hardware emulating a 1900 CPU. This ran one of the George 1 OS variants that managed the operator's console, an integrated printer, card reader and a disk drive spindle carrying one 5MB fixed disk platter and one removable 5MB disk platter. In addition it could support green-screen user terminals and at least one standard 1900 EDS 60 disk drive - not too dusty for a machine the size of a managing director's desk and running in a standard office environment.
I don't remember the 2903 throwing any wobblers during the 12 months my team was using it, but the EDS 60 drive was another issue: it was fine during the NYC summer when the aircon was on, but it was most unhappy during the winter because, like many NYC offices, there was no cooling available for it during the winter when the office heating was on.
The 2903 ran all the standard 1900 software we needed for the project including COBOL and PLAN compilers and utility programs.
The larger 2900 series of machines were heavily influenced and borrowed from the experimental work of the University of Manchester’s MU5.
Built in collaboration with ICL West Gorton which was just around the corner from the university.
Lots of wonderful historical information here from my old prof of processor architecture - https://ethw.org/The_University_of_Manchester_MU5_Computer_System
The Russians found it fairly easy to copy the Williams tube but it took them some years to copy core memory.
True story. Imagine the staff tea room in the Manchester CS department in late 1969...
Tom Kilburn: "How much does a colour TV cost, then?"
Somebody: "About £250, I think."
[As a reminder, £1000 per year was a good starting salary back then.]
Tom: "Not worth waiting until they're cheaper, then."
Everybody: dead silence
It was utterly impossible to know whether Tom was being serious or not. We certainly all wondered how much his salary was.
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But that's the whole point of digital computing using binary devices where you can easily detect on/off states. The first ones were indeed more or less cobbled together but this allowed for continual improvements, and occasional step changes, along the whole chain. But the principle – that any equation that can be expressed using binary logic can be automated – meant that calculations that had previously taken days, could be done in hours, if not minutes. This was required for a military increasingly keen on understanding fluid dynamics and, er, other things, but also potential commercial advantage for businesses.
The innate "fragility" of the equipment, of couse, was the direct genesis of the term "bug" that we still use. But it also encouraged the development both of more robust – solid state – components but also of resilient strategies so that less would be lost the next time a butterfly got in the wrong place of a valve failed.
I can't imagine that a device with 1000 valves would set any records for uptime.
The original Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) air defense computers had 49,000 valves (or 60,000 to 80,000, by another reference) and an average annual maintenance downtime of 3.77 hours per year. This was achieved by making the computers duplex - one half was almost certainly running while moths were being fished out of the valves of the other.
SAGE's reliability was also helped by improving the valves. Reliability of the valves was increased from 500 to 500,000 hours by methodically tackling failure points in valve manufacture. Finally, SAGE had a diagnostic system for identifying tubes that were drifting toward failure, which allowed repairs before the hardware failed.
"crystallographic calculations and was designing one in a barn in Fenny Compton, Warwickshire".
That's rather a coincidence. That was where the former Post Office post-masters & post-mistresses gathered in 2009 to start their actions against the Post Office's now discredited ICL/Fujitsu Horizon IT system.
It would be most interesting to know who designed and implemented the Horizon system, if only because, in my experience, the ICL Dataskill project managers and implementation bods were pretty much top notch: FWIW I was one of the 80 contractors involved in the rescuing the Naval Dockyard Project back in 1975: That was 10 years late and around 10 million over budget when ICL Dataskill replaced the useless civil service management and we contractors replaced the poorly trained civil service programmers. Collectively, we had that project up, tested, and running in 18 months.
Consequently, I've always wondered exactly who was responsible for Horizon: I'd be completely gobsmacked to find that anybody from Dataskil had a hand in it!
Many years ago and the day before a Ph.D. viva I visited Bletchley. A gentleman gave an explanation on the tech behind the Colossus machine (which was conveniently on hand). I chatted with him afterwards and he was impressively knowledgeable about 1950s Japanese computing kit. The photo in the article (no TFA here) looks very much like that gentleman. Top bloke.
(If i am wrong then whoever gave the Colossus talk was a top bloke.)
I am not TheReg, but out of curiosity: What exact URL are you using "daily"? My preference: https://www.theregister.com/Week/
However, if you are talking about "my comments show up four days late" as AC, your way of expression is ambiguous, and do you expect TheReg to track you as AC?
Maybe you should learn German and live here for a year, then you will miss the precision of the German language once you are back - like Hayley Alexis does.
Stevenage home of Airbus Defence and Space - developing satellites and planetary surface rovers, this was Marconi Space and other names until Astrium->Airbus. Here also was born the Prospero X3 satellite which was the only satellite to orbit by a 1960s UK launcher and is still in orbit today. Also, down the same road, MBDA which is the evolution of English Electric and British Aerospace/B.Ae defence contractors and developers of some vicious missile ordnance. Various support firms also exist in this little tech cluster. It's down the road a few minutes from Letchworth, home of BTM in its day.
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