For the Old Computer types in here

[bert]

End of an era

[Tim Watts]

I'm old but alas ICL means nothing to me - I was a DEC fan and sadly HP grabbed them yonks ago....

[Bob Eager]

I worked in an ICL/Elliott 4130 for some years, and then an ICL 2960.

ICL was an amalgamation (nationalisation) of several companies, and had an excess of (not very good) middle managers - rather like BT now. We had to deal with them, at least indirectly - not a good experience except in rare cases.

There's an apocryphal story about one such manager, which indicates their general reputation:

"He went to a meeting at West Gorton. At the end of the day he met a colleague in reception, and they agreed to share a taxi back to Piccadilly Station. On the train home, he was perplexed that he couldn't find the return half of his ticket, and didn't have enough money to pay the guard. He had to leave his name and address. The colleague offered him a lift home from Watford Station, which was gratefully accepted. On arrival, he invited the driver in for a sherry, telling his wife how grateful he was for the lift from the station. 'Oh, whatever's happened?', she replied. 'Where on earth is the car?'. Actually, it was in Manchester, because he had gone there by road."

[Brian Gaff]

Well, is not ICL now part of Fujitsu? There are still a lot of old mainframes etc floating about in museums, though whether any work or can be used to demonstrate anything is debatable. Brian

[Broadback]

ICL Kidsgrove died quite some time ago. Incidentally there is a van parked outside a small computer company next to the A34 near Trentham gardens, it seems the company have an agreement with Fujitsu to use the ICL logo. so not quite dead yet.

[Bob Eager]

There's a working Elliott 803 at NMoC, and they have a 2966 almost working - won't be long now.

[Tim Streater]

I must tell them not to push down, at the same time, the three push-buttons which are in a cluster at the right-front of the console. That will result in a service call.

[newshound]

First flow diagram I ever wrote was coded up to run on an 803. To do, potentially, a brute force attack on Fermat's last theorem. A guy from Distillers in Burgh Heath gave a talk at our 6th form science club (mid

60's) and got us to do flow diagrams which he coded up, and brought back the results a month later. Mine was one of the few that ran (sort of) correctly. Except that it found 5, 12, 13 *and* 12, 5, 13. My coding improved somewhat after that.

[Martin]

HP didn't grab them, they bought what was left after DEC went bust.

[Martin]

LOL

I'd find this hard to believe except I had a similar experience with a German who couldn't find his car in the company car park. In his case it turned out that he had taken it to a garage to be serviced.

[Martin]

I started programming 54 years ago using an Elliott 803.

[Bob Eager]

Well, not quite. Compaq bought what was left. Then HP bought what was left of Compaq.

[Andrew]

Actually Compaq grabbed them first before HP took over.

[Geoff Clare]

It was Compaq who bought DEC. Then a few years later HP bought Compaq.

[Andrew]

The LOndon Hospital computer centre had an Elliot 803. Apparently it had tape drives where the tape was like a 35 mm film, with sprocket holes.

That was then replaced by a Univac 418-III in the late 60's, with a massive horizontal drum called a FastRand, where the read write heads were a long bar that was moved from side to side across the drum, which was about 6 feet wide. It also had 4 'spin dryer' drums that allowed an access time of 4.25 millseconds which was fast for that era. These could never be powered off because they developed a vibration at a particular speed which wrecked the bearings. The card reader was the size of car. Needed a 400 Mhz power supply which occupied a room all on its own.

It was an 18 bit one's complement machine, so Octal 777776 was -1 and

777777 was minus zero which generated an error stop. Also, no stack. Calling a subroutine meant using an assembler instruction SLJ (sludge)

- store location and jump, so you could go to any depth you liked, except that it only had 128 *K* words of 18-bit memory so the London Hospital real-time system was an RTOS batch job that ran all day and within that the 16 available files were logically mapped to provide multiple inhouse database files, with transaction processing and full before and after journalling and logical transactions. 128 Uniscope VDUs and printers around the hospital provided 24/7 services to all the wards and clinics in the 1970's when few commercial programmers had even heard of the concept of a logical transaction.

All written in Univac assembler and developed using punched cards by hospital staff programmers. :-)

[whisky-dave]

Here's our first one being installed.

I wasn't there at the time.

[Tim Streater]

Yes, and what does HP do today? Far cry from going to a DECUS meeting in the 80s and finding there were 20,000 attendees. Even in the US, not that many places could host it.

One session I attended was a touch boring, so I counted up the number of seats in my row and the number of rows of chairs. Not far off 5,000 people at that session.

[Tim Streater]

Me too - using Elliot Autocode.

[Tim Streater]

It was 35mm film. With a magnetic coating instead of a light-sensitive coating.

[Tim Streater]

400MHz?