Early Computers

Dad had his first encounter with a computer in 1961 on a school trip to the local Saunders-Roe aircraft design office. It was a Ferranti Pegasus. He built an analog computer for a school project in 1963. The following are some of the early computers that he worked with, or on.

MAINFRAME COMPUTERS

  • Ferranti Argus at Southampton University in 1962.
  • English Electric KDF-9 at Keele University in 1964.
  • AEI 1010 at Associated Electrical Industries in 1965.
  • Elliott 803B at UCNW Bangor in 1966 - About 250 were built. Only three survive, one at the Science Museum , London. There's a simulator for it that is written in Java [Download]
  • Elliott 4130 at UCNW Bangor in 1968.
  • DEC PDP-7, PDP-8 and PDP-9 at Time Sharing Limited in 1969 (also accessed from home via a 100 Baud modem!).
  • DEC PDP-10 and KA-10 at Time Sharing Limited in 1970-72 (also accessed from home via a 200 Baud modem!).
  • IBM System/360 at Unilever (while at Time Sharing Limited) in 1970.
  • CDC 6600 at Control Data Sciences (while at Time Sharing Limited) in 1971.
  • ICL System 4 (an English Electric version of the RCA Spectra) at International Computers Limited in 1973-76.
  • ICL 1900 (1903A, 1906A & 1906S) Series at ICL in 1973-76.
  • ICL 2900 (2970, 2960 and 2980) at International Computers Limited in 1974-1983.
  • ICL Content Addressable Filesystem (CAFS) at International Computers Limited in 1975.
  • ICL [Singer] System 10 at International Computers Limited in 1976.
  • Ferranti F100-M at International Computers Limited in 1978.
  • ICL Distributed Array Processor (MIL/DAP) at International Computers Limited in 1979.
  • Tandem NonStop 1 while at International Computers Limited in 1980.
  • Cray Cray-1 while at International Computers Limited in 1980.
  • ICL ME29 at International Computers Limited in 1981.
  • Cray X-MP while at International Computers Limited in 1982.
  • IBM System/370 at Automation Technology Products in 1983.

PERSONAL COMPUTERS


WORKSTATION COMPUTERS

He also encountered some novel computer storage systems over the years.

STORAGE TECHNOLOGIES

  • NCR CRAM - Card Random Access Memory. Addressable, magnetically coated storage cards dropped from a rack and were read on a rotating drum before being returned to the rack.
  • DECtapes - Compact magnetic tapes that stored randomly addressable blocks of data.
  • Sinclair Microdrive - A tiny tape cassette used with the Sinclair ZX Spectrum.
  • ICL CAFS - A Content Addressable File Store that used a specially programmed disk drive that could search for data extremely fast.
  • IBM HPSS - A High Performance Storage System designed to meet the needs of the U.S. National Laboratories.
  • ZFS - Sun's Zettabyte File System, with built in volume management.
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