GHOST Graphics

[Jim Beacon]

From: "Paul Williams" <paul at frixxon.co.uk

> It is scary to think that it is nearly twenty years since I worked at
> the UK Atomic Energy Authority at Culham Labs, Oxfordshire, the home of
> GHOST. There was a Software Applications Group, and I worked my sandwich
> year there from July 1987 to August 1988,

That ties in nicely - I was at Trent Polytechnic (now Nottingham Trent
University) from '88 to '90.

>with about three other
> students. One of them got to work on GHOST development, whereas I only
> had to use it to update an accounting package for the PRIME network.
> COST3D took the numbers from PRIMROSE (a tortuous acronym) to produce
> some pretty graphs to demonstrate the trend away from using the
> minicomputer networks and mainframes (Primes and VAXen at Culham, and
> the IBM 3084Q and Cray 2 at Harwell) towards workstations (sexy black
> Whitechapel MG-1s).

That sounds like an interesting set up! We had the VAX cluster (don't know
what machines were involved), with VT100 and Tek terminals, as well as a
small number of PC's (286 / 386) and some Apollo Domain 3500's (used for PCB
layout work). We also used Motorola D2 training systems for machine code lab
work (once you learnt how to program at a 1's and 0's level, you were
allowed to use the cross-assembler).

> IIRC, GHOST was written in FORTRAN, as most of our applications were,
> and created and maintained by a Mr Prior (I'm not being formal -- I
> can't remember his name, despite Google's hint that his initials are WAJ).

That's interesting - I only knew the package as an end user.
>
> Unfortunately, my Industrial Training Report doesn't provide any more
> details, and I can't find the few graphs from that time that I printed
> from one of the Tektronix terminals. No software either, sorry!

Somewhere I have prinouts of the plots we created, but they could be
anywhere now, the only definite is that I haven't thrown out my old college
notes!

Jim.