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Historic ICT 1301 on show
Computer history enthusiasts will be heading on July 13 to a car rally at a Kent farm where the only working ICT 1301 mainframe computer from 1962 will be on display. The machine, nicknamed Flossie, has the serial number 6 and was the first machine out of the factory of the company which later merged with English Electric to become ICL. Its designed, Dr Raymond Bird, is pictured above visiting the restored machine in 2004 when he was aged 81. It is a second-generation UK computer design, clocking 1MHz, with 4000 printed circuit boards using discrete germanium transistors, a decade before integrated circuits began to make their mark. It boasts 2000 words of 48 bit magnetic core store, several drum stores, and an optical card reader and punch. It was originally used to process London University GCE results and is set up to do pounds, shillings and pence as well as new-fangled decimal currency. Later it was sold as scrap to students who used it to process large club membership lists in the 1970s. Now a group of enthusiasts is trying to recover software contained in half inch 10 track magnetic tapes. It is now at Buss Farm, in Kent, venue for The Darling Buds Classic Car Show on July 13.
I think this was the machine I cut my teeth on in ICT's 5/6 factory in Stevenage in 1962. Most of the electronics came from GEC in Coventry, as ICT were still feeling their way out of the era of tabulators, card punches, sorters and the rest of prediluvian data processing. Those were the days when you really got a lot of blinking lights for your money. RAM was about the size of a telephone booth and I think came to about 5K 'words', although I can't remember exactly how big a 'word' was. Great machine, though.
Posted by Chris Yapp | June 20, 2008 3:36 PM