Fifty Years Ago .... from the pages of Computer Weekly

1969/70 in computing compiled by TNMOC volunteer archivist, Brian Aldous.

A selection of stories from Computer Weekly from the winter of 1969/70. The full archive of Computer Weekly can be seen at TNMOC, where there are special rolling displays of front pages from 25 and 40 years ago.

First 1900 in US

Following hard on ICL’s announcement of their intention to infiltrate the North American computer market comes the news of their first American sale. An ICL 1902A has been ordered by Barclays Bank DCO to replace an IBM punched card installation in their New York offices. (4/12/69)

Off-line 1902A terminal

Following the installation of equipment this month, Glasgow steelmakers William Beardmore Ltd, a subsidiary of Thomas Firth and John Brown Ltd, will prepare to operate an off-line terminal connected to an ICL 1902A computer at the group’s Sheffield headquarters for stores, accounting, sales and wages control, as well as order analyses applications. (4/12/69 p3)

Scheduling system to keep check of engine repairs

Two years ago BEA’s Management Advisory Services and Production Engineering decided that the airline’s overhaul system needed to be speeded up. As a result a computer based production scheduling system which ensures that engine repairs are done in the correct order, has been introduced at Heathrow Engineering Base. The new system, which uses Feedback data collection equipment worth £16,000, is thought to be the first of its kind to be used by a European airline. Daily work schedules and progress lists are produced on BEA’s ICL 1903. (4/12/69 p12)

MARCH series for process control

Rationalisation of GEC-Elliott Automation has led to the evolution of a single, unified range of process control computers, replacing the heterogeneous assortment bequeathed by last year’s merger. Known as the MARCH series, the new range has been formed by combining Elliott’s ARCH series with machines from English Electric’s M range, and includes five processors, ranging in price from £4,000 to over £30,000. In ascending order of size they are: the M2112, the Elliott 105, 9000 and 9050, and the M2140. (11/12/69 p1)

GEC-EA win orders in East Europe

The commissioning of an on-line process control system, claimed to be the largest in Europe, and two further orders for computer control systems, mark the end of a particularly successful 12-month period for GEC-Elliott Automation, during which business with Eastern Europe has been trebled with orders amounting to nearly £9 million. The on-line process control system, which has been installed at the Schedt refinery in East Germany, 60 miles northeast of Berlin, at present comprises three ARCH systems used to optimise the production of a variety of products including ammonia, nitric acid and fertilisers. (18-25/12/69 p1)

Plessey buys Ferranti’s Numerical Control Interests

Following the acquisition of Airmec in October, Plessey have now bought out Ferranti’s numerical control interests. These moves should produce the rationalisation of the machine tools industry which has been advocated by the Industrial Reorganisation Corporation and Mintech. A new company, Plessey Numerical Controls Ltd, is being set up as part of the Plessey Electronics group. (18-25/12/69 p20)

Met Office picks IBM’s new giant

The announcement that the Meteorological Office is to install an IBM 360/195, worth between £3.5 and £4 million, at its headquarters at Bracknell, Berks, ends months of speculation as to which computer manufacturer would pull off this important order. The long story of the Met Office order can be traced back at least as far as April, 1968, when the Treasury gave approval in principal for the expenditure of "several million pounds” on a replacement for COMET, the Met Office KDF9 system at Bracknell. At that time it was expected that the main beneficiary of the Treasury’s generosity would be ICL whose new large computer, Project 51, was expected to be ready by this year. (8/1/70 p1)

Hatfield's PDP-10 to be made available to local schools

A major project which will allow substantial computer access to schools in Hertfordshire will come into operation in September when Hatfield Polytechnic completes its installation of a DEC PDP-10 multi-access computer valued at nearly £300,000. The polytechnic has previously experimented with computer education in schools linking schools to one of its two Elliott 803B machines. This facility was limited to six schools and allowed each school only about one hour per day of central processor time. The new computer will have a 64K 36-bit word core store with a fixed disc of 500,000 words capacity, two exchangeable disc units of 5.2 million words each, four DEC tape units and paper tape and punched card peripherals. A PDP-8/I will be used as communications processor. (8/1/70 p12)

Mini-machines market boosted

Two new machines, each a response to different aspects of the increasing demand for mini-computers, have been launched in the UK. From Ferranti’s Automated Systems Division comes the Argus 600 which is claimed, at about £1,700, to be the cheapest digital computer available in this country. And from DEC there is the PDP-11, at £3,900 and above, incorporating features normally only available on larger machines. The demand anticipated by Ferranti for the Argus 600, which has been tested by users for some while, has led them to plan for large-scale production and they are “ready to meet demands reaching a level of many hundreds or possibly thousands a year.” (15/1/70 p1)

‘Teaching’ a Pattern Recognition machine

A machine which can recognise patterns presented to it, whether visual or auditory, has been developed in the Applied Physics Laboratory of Stanford Research Institute, California. Not only can Minos II identify and discriminate between patterns, it can be taught to recognise up to 66 different categories of pattern automatically. One can conceive of many potential applications for a sophisticated machine like Minos II: object identification in aerial photographs, recognition of handwritten characters, weather prediction, industrial process control, and recognition of spoken words.The input to the machine is through a pre-processor, which presents visual images of objects to be identified in a special way. The object is viewed through an array of 1,000 lenses. Each lens produces an identical image of the object. These 1,000 identical images are the raw material that Minos II must process in a sophisticated way to determine the category of the object. (15/1/70 p17)

Compilation of Telephone Directories gets radical changes

The logistics of the telephone directory service are staggering. Telephone directories alone cost an annual £4 million to compile, produce and distribute; the Directory Inquiries service costs £7 million; there are 22 million copies of directories issued every year, using 25,000 tons of paper; a complete set of directories covering the whole country contains 30,000 pages and 7,500,000 entries. By 1975 all these figures will have increased by half as much again. Until recently the compiling of telephone directories was a manual operation, and the printing was by conventional hot press methods. With the necessity of up-dating each directory every 15 months, it became clear to the Post Office that radical changes in the compilation and printing methods would have to be introduced if the service was to keep up with the expansion of the telephone service. In association with the National Data Processing Service and Her Majesty’s Stationery Office (which prints the directories) the Post Office therefore devised a system, using computerised typesetting control which they claim is the most advanced of its kind in Europe, and possibly anywhere. (22/1/70 p12)

Major motorway order goes to GEC-Elliott

More than 800 miles of motorway in England and Wales, some still under construction, will be equipped with a computer-based traffic control system for which GEC-Elliott Traffic Automation will supply computer hardware and software in two contracts with the Ministry of Transport worth £481,000 and extending up to 1974. Five in-stations will each have two MARCH 9050 computers operating in tandem. The contracts also cover the communications equipment to link them to 12 control offices, and the video terminals, telephone switching panels and mimic diagrams, as well as standard software and special programs which will be written as part of the future increased automation of the system. (22/1/70 p32)

Data transmission by Optical Link

An optical data transmission system that will provide full duplex point-to-point communication for high speed terminals at locations where cable installation would be too expensive or impractical, and where other methods would not be suitable, has been introduced by the Computer Transmission Corp of Los Angeles. The system is known as Optran and is based on infra-red techniques. The Model 1815, announced as the first in a family of similar units, can be used in almost any situation where two optical units can be placed in line-of-sight contact, free from the possibility of accidental obstruction. (29/1/70 p12)

Galaxy Sweeps the Stars

A new era in optical astronomy was launched last week with the coming into operation of the Royal Observatory of Edinburgh’s Galaxy system; a development described by the Astronomer Royal for Scotland as an enormous advance in terms of measuring the movement of stars and study of the evolution of the galaxies. Developed by the ROE in conjunction with the small local firm of Faul-Coradi Scotland, Galaxy is basically an automatic mapping and measuring machine, with close affinities to an electron microscope. Its output is fed into and analysed by an Elliott 4130 system which includes five mag tape units, paper tape reader and an ICL line printer. (29/1/70 p15)

CEGB Power Station to have ARGUS 500

Three Argus 500 computers are to form the central control hardware for a 1,250-megawatt nuclear power station now being built for the Central Electricity Generating Board at Hartlepool, on the north east coast. Besides the three Arguses, Ferranti’s Automation Systems Division will supply two complete sets of scanning and peripheral equipment, one set for each reactor-turbine-alternator unit. These include analogue scanners, disc stores, digital output relays and two independent CRT systems each with seven displays. The whole contract is understood to be worth about £1m. The power station, whose reactors will be of the gas-cooled type, is being built by British Nuclear Design and Construction Ltd who will write the systems software for the project. The system is designed for one Argus 500 to be on permanent stand-by. and for automatic self-testing routines to cause it to be switched in in the event of processor failure. (5/2/70 p1)

Myriad-Based Systems for Traffic Control

Two new vehicle control systems based on the Myriad computer and designed to simplify and improve the operation of large vehicle fleets have been developed by Marconi Research Laboratories at Chelmsford. The systems have been demonstrated to several bus companies including the Bristol Omnibus Co and London Transport. The system demonstrated to London Transport uses a 16K Myriad and is capable of automatically locating and identifying every vehicle throughout a network and presenting information about them on a display screen at a central control centre. Any variations from schedule are immediately detected, and a voice link between the centre and drivers enables any fresh instructions to be passed on immediately. Every vehicle is fitted with a distance digitiser, which counts the wheel revolutions and thus measures the distance travelled along a fixed route. Vehicles are also fitted with a two-channel radio telephone and a telemetry unit. Digital information from the digitiser is passed into the data input register of the telemetry unit, and the message is continuously up-dated at a prescribed rate. The control room computer can interrogate this register via the telemetry channel of the radio telephone, and the total elapsed distance count currently held in it will be passed over the link. (19/2/70 p32)

ICL Wins Russian Order for 1905E

An export order has been granted to ICL for the delivery of a 1905E computer to Electrosila of Leningrad, makers of probably the largest turbogenerators in the world. The order also includes a Ferranti Argus 500 machine and the system’s primary application will be to test the company’s products. The 1905E will have a 32K core store, two exchangeable disc drives with a capacity of eight million characters each, two sets of four 60 Kc magnetic tape units, a 1,350 lpm printer using a Cyrillic character set and a 300 lpm printer, a graph plotter, and punched card and paper tape peripherals. (26/2/70 p1)