[cctalk] Re: Waaaay OT: Re: Re: Classic computing - earliest years

On 18/10/2025 07:03, Johan Helsingius via cctalk wrote: I would say most every one on this list has one and possible several British designed, and possibly UK assembled computers somewhere. Whilst it does use chips made outside the Raspberry Pi is pretty much UK designed, using an ARM CPU. Much of the original layout and circuit was done by one by my old friends Peter Lomas  and it was initially assembled in Wales. I understand that like the ARM chip it can be licenced by almost any one. We have a history of helping IBM build computers... .. their first electronic machine the IBM 701 used Kilburn-Williams tubes, developed in Manchester and licenced to IBM .. the later machines used Virtual Memory, developed for the Atlas computer, again under licence from Manchester University.. .. Speculative Execution probably originates from Heuristic Caching developed on the MU5 computer.... IBM also ran a major research centre at  IBM  Hursley, near Winchester, UK , where CICS support was , and possibly still is based. Today Manchester still does computer research, so Steve Furber one of the original designers of the ARM chip has built a million core machine for Neural Networks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpiNNaker Well IBM had several plants in the UK. Keyboards and IBM PCs were made in Scotland. Disk Drives at Havant, Hampshire. Dave p.s. as for oil, IBM was I think the only company to put its core in Oil Tanks. Not sure if they ever leaked, but some 70xx machines used this technique to keep the temperature constant.