British Computers

[Andrew Back]

On Wed, 5 Sep 2007, David Cantrell wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 03, 2007 at 01:57:12PM +0100, Peter Coghlan wrote:
>
>> Several multinationals had or have a presence in Ireland ...
>>
>> Many of these built computers or peripherals here for the European market.
>> However, it is pretty much the same as equipment thats found everywhere else
>> in the world. I am not aware of anything that could be regarded as being
>> uniquely Irish in the same way that for example Acorn kit could be regarded
>> as being British.
>
> I'd be inclined to count the Mentec PDP-11s, even though they didn't
> create them to start with.

In terms of British minis there were at British Gas in Leeds (England) 
in the 80s a system made by Cossor Electronics (also made scopes and 
valve radios etc) that was based around a TMS9900, finished in a very 
fetching orange with flicky-switches operator panel. It had Pertec disk 
drives each with a separate 19" 2U 'formatter' unit (controller?), remote 
graphics heads that had some kind of controller (kb in, and RGB 
out to big 20 inch or so CCTV-style monitors) hooked-up to the CPU by 
extended serial links. It also had banks and banks of modems, and operated 
in some sort of dual config with hardware watchdogs. It performed 'grid 
control' for the distribution of gas in the North East of England, via 
UHF radio links to inhouse designed (hw+sw) telemetry 'outstations' that 
could open and close valves, control compressors etc, and report back 
temp, pressure and so on.

When I arrived at British Gas as a trainee it was sat uncoupled in the 
corner of the workshop, and had been replaced by a VAXserver cluster with 
satellite VS2000 nodes as workstations. I used to get in early to hook-up 
the Cossor and play around with it. It made a real racket as the bearings 
were gone in a Pertec drive, and so my elders and betters would throw 
tools at me on arrival until I powered it all down!

Never seen or heard of a Cossor computer since, but I did hear at the time 
(early 90s) that Heathrow airport had the same systems still in use.

This has also just reminded me of another very cool device we had at BG. A 
thing called a 'Radac' that was essentially a metal drum a bit smaller 
than a can of coke. With tracks of mag tape inside, a motor attached to 
the outside, and a mechanical selector to move the heads. These were part 
of alarm systems that had a mechanical dialler, and would dial you up if 
at a remote radio site a burglar was detected, fire alarm went off, or 
backup genny kicked in etc. You'd get a call with "ALARM! GARROWBY HILL! 
FIRE!" or something... I wish I'd hung on to some Radacs when the system 
was replaced!

Andrew