Russian computing: back from Siberia

Doron Swade

During the Cold War scientific collaboration between the West and the Eastern-bloc countries was officially prohibited. With the recent collapse of state communism as the official ideology of the former Soviet Union the West now has unprecedented access to centres of excellence and to the communities of scientists and engineers that people them.

The newly lowered ideological guard was one factor favouring a visit to our new and tentative allies in a Western-styled market economy. The determining stimulus was a range of extraordinary tales told by the growing trickle of Westerners returning from the former Soviet Union.

There were tales of Russian-designed machines built into DEC consoles that outperformed their Western equivalents by several orders of magnitude - Volkswagens with V8 engines; tales of ternary logic computers for which there was no Western counterpart (MIR); and finally, a tale of a winking monster - a Cold War supercomputer - that occupied an entire floor. It was rumoured to have thousands of flashing console lights, was operated in near darkness in the heart of Siberia, and was said to be the last working version of the legendary Besm-6 supercomputer.

The prospect of verifying travellers' tales of this kind was irresistible. I went to Russia to forage for historic computers for acquisition by the Science Museum, profoundly intrigued by these apocryphal yarns.

In preparation for what was to be my first trip to the former Soviet Union I read what I could find on Russian computers. The literature search was both baffling and revealing. In British computer culture names such as Edsac, Elliott, Pegasus, Deuce, ACE, and LEO have rich resonances for their designers, technicians and users.

I found that Russian computer culture has its own tribal icons - Ural, Mesm, MIR, Riad, Nairi, Strela, Besm, Elbrus - acronymic tags as rich in shared history and personal associations to the Soviet computer community as our acronymic mantras are to us. Yet these machines are practically unknown to Western historians of computing and barely feature in the historical canon.

A second striking feature of the literature search was how little public domain material has been published in English. A large part of what little there is has its origins in the US military. This material, written for the most part during the Cold War years, goes to extraordinary lengths to establish the 'backwardness' of Russian computer hardware. A central feature of the propaganda war was the issue of technological supremacy.

The triumphalist spirit in which Russian 'backwardness' is trumpeted appears to us now insensitive and even brutal. The trouble taken to convince ourselves of our own supremacy cannot be seen outside the context of threat and insecurity of the Cold War. The challenge to modern computer history is to evaluate the extent to which Cold War historiography is propagandist.

In the West, Russian programmers command respect and even awe. One reason advanced for the excellence of Soviet software is that the originality of their algorithms and the efficiency of their code was an enforced compensatory response to inferior hardware.

Others advanced more ominous reasons. Developments in science and technology that offered any prospect of practical application were appropriated and controlled by the state, and abstraction into theory was posited as a refuge from centralised control. The more abstract and theoretical the research the less manifest was its practical value and the greater the immunity from unwelcome controls.

The major strategic conflict in the development of Soviet hardware centred on the choice between 'make and take', ie. whether to maintain indigenous independent Soviet design, or whether to copy from the West. The tension came to a head in the late Sixties. The temptation to bypass long and costly hardware development cycles by copying Western hardware won the day. Sergei Lebedyev (1902-1974), an influential protagonist of independent development, was defeated by the copyist lobby. From then on Russian machines adopted Western architectures.

Hardware based predominantly on IBM, Burroughs and DEC machines was cloned, reverse engineered, pirated and sometimes even directly purchased. But the time-lag involved in cloning or reverse engineering proved to be an unforeseen handicap, and the performance gap in the hardware platforms apparently widened. The period of particular interest to the history of computing is the period of indigenous development starting in the late 1940s and which predates the era of cloning.

If the early Soviet computers, particularly the Mesm (1951/2), the M-20 (1958/9) and the Besm series (1953-1967), developed during the isolationist years of the Cold War, are similar in architecture and performance to Western contemporary machines, then this either says something significant about the uniqueness of the solutions, or that the official prohibition against technological exchange was not as complete as is publicly perceived. On the other hand, if Soviet machines are significantly different, then the Soviet computing community is something of a lost tribe. Either way the history of computing now faces a challenging new chapter.

In this abbreviated account I propose to omit discussion of particular machines, their development (technical and political), and the figures responsible for their design and production. (I am happy to provide sources for anyone interested.) Instead I propose to add to the growing corpus of travellers' tales that I found deeply revealing about Soviet computing culture.

Dima, a bearded fiercely gentle Muscovite, is Principal Programmer at the Institute of Physics, Russian Academy of Science, Moscow, and he took us to visit his Institute. As Principal Programmer, his state salary is $15 per month.

The atmosphere in the lab was casual. There was no evidence of any form of supervisory presence and staff seemed to be working on whatever they pleased. One physicist was experimenting with magnetic liquids, another the thermo- magnetic strips from which he was making novelty motors, which he hoped to sell. (Dima confided that the physicist's wife had been nagging him about money and his deficient entrepreneurial spirit in the new and insecure age of perestroika. So I bought a specially-made thermo-magnetic motor for $20 as a sample - a sum equivalent to six weeks state salary - as a way of alleviating this domestic difficulty).

This laisser-faire anarchy aroused my curiosity about lines of authority, delegation of duties and the hierarchies of responsibility. I presented the following scenario to Dima. I was a distinguished Russian physicist newly arrived at the Institute and I needed someone to write some programs. With a view to securing Dima's services I approached and described what I wanted. "What happens?" I asked, "How does it work?". "I tell you to go to hell" said Dima. "What do I do?" I asked, shocked. "Go and ask someone else". "What happens then?". "He tells you to go to hell".

He explained that he was not obliged to work for anyone and that I could secure the services of a member of staff only if I could establish some shared personal understanding and trust. I had read that in tsarist Russia survival depended on the mutual trust of a small group of close contacts, often using a system of nicknames known only to those in the group, and that reliance on personal ties remained the underlying social norm. Dima's response was a blunt reminder that Western preconceptions about the relationship between organisational structure and the de facto exercise of power could be misleading.

This was not the only instance in which the official hierarchy of authority concealed a subculture of personal networks of influence. On arrival at the Institute of Informatic Systems, Novosibirsk, Siberia, I asked after the legendary machines I had read about - Ural, MIR, and particularly the Burroughs-based supercomputer, Elbrus, the successor to the Besm. I was received with blank stares and polite evasions and I let it drop.

There were several days of intense negotiation over future collaboration between the Science Museum and the Institute, and over price and shipping arrangements for the consignment of historic equipment being bartered for. Agreement over each clause was accompanied by elaborate speechifying, a mandatory one-gulp swig of vodka, and renewed good fellowship.

On the third day our unremitting schedule of back-to-back meetings was suddenly cancelled. "At three-thirty" announced Dimitri Kouznetsov out of the blue, "you see Elbrus". This was the carefully guarded supercomputer the existence of which they had at first refused to acknowledge. The three days of negotiation appeared to have established a trust after which our hosts could not do enough for us.

Though bemused by our interest in arcane pieces of hardware long since consigned to obscurity, they sportingly foraged for us and took amused pride in not being defeated by any request. One of the prizes of these foraging parties was a large Russian-made 64K core store cloned for an IBM computer in the mid-Seventies proudly lugged into the meeting room by a grinning engineer and an equally chuffed deputy director of the Institute.

During the Cold War years the Co-ordinating Committee for East-West Trade (CoCom) controlled East-West technology transfer. CoCom regulations restricted the purchase by Eastern bloc countries of advanced technology from West - this to prevent piracy and advantage being taken, particularly by the military, of Western leads.

Long after 16-bit machines were off-the-shelf consumer items in the United States and Western Europe, CoCom regulations still confined advanced technology for West-to-East trade to 8-bit machines with restrictions on clock speed and memory size. I know from my own consulting experience that the DTI/CoCom bureaucratic labyrinth and the time taken to secure export clearance was enough to deter all but the most determined entrepreneur hoping to exploit Soviet market potential.

While being shown around the Institute of Informatic Systems I commented to our host that personal computers seemed plentiful. Secretaries had colour screens and Western software, and this conflicted with our received perception that personal computers were scarce and that technology transfer had been effectively controlled by CoCom. He laughed. Waving at the computers he said, "yellow PCs". He explained that these were branded and unbranded machines acquired from far Eastern plants under contract to Western companies. The Soviet market had been supplied by back-door arrangements for direct supply of PCs from the East where CoCom controls were impossible to enforce.

Dimitri Kouznetsov, a young computer scientist at the Institute, was our main translator in the protracted negotiations, and during our various visits. I asked him whether there was the same lust for personal computers in Russia as in the West. He pointed to the barred windows on the fourth floor of the Institute. "How far apart do you think they are?". I looked puzzled. "Just less than the width of a PC". He assured me that he was serious and that PCs had been lowered out of the windows to waiting recipients on the ground.

The attitude of Dimitri and his cronies to bureaucracy and officialdom was not always entirely reverent. The team had arrived at the Institute one morning to find uniformed guards on each of the landings prohibiting access to their labs. Apparently the place had been temporarily commandeered for secret military or space research computation. Security clearance was required though no instructions had been given to the guards about what form of ID was required or who had right of access. Perestroika and the uneasy adoption of market reforms had begun to undermine the formerly guaranteed security of academic tenure.

The Novosibirsk Institute has been singularly successful at attracting interest from Western companies seeking to outsource research and development in the former Soviet republic. The Institute sought increased financial security from such arrangements and Western companies hoped to take advantage of the vast untapped intellectual resource of the accessible Eastern bloc scientific communities. Several companies, Hewlett-Packard included, had sent delegations to explore R&D opportunities and individual company representatives had given Dimitri their business cards. Confronted with a demand for ID, Dimitri pulled out one of the Hewlett-Packard business cards, and offered it to the guard. The guard did not know what it was but was suitably impressed and let Dimitri pass.

Our Siberian hosts took us to a vast flea market that operated year-round in frozen wastes outside Novosibirsk. The market was called barasholka which literally means 'rubbish place'.

This black market had operated throughout the Communist era and Dimitri regarded its survival as a monument to the indestructibility of something as fundamental to human nature as free trade.

The visit was concealed from the directorate of the Institute because of the physical risk to foreigners from hostile and mistrustful natives. We were warned to carry no money, not to carry a camera and in no circumstances to speak English. If we wished to purchase anything we were to signal and withdraw out of earshot and our renegade young hosts from the Institute would transact for us. They speculated that we were possibly the first foreigners to visit this market. Temperatures dropped to up to 30 degrees below zero. There was light snow and the winds were bitterly cold.

Next to livestock, car spares, furs, frozen meat, and household goods were stalls with ICs, electronic components, peripherals, radio spares and partial chassis and subassemblies - an open-air Siberian Lyle Street. Prized among this loot were reverse-engineered Sinclair ZX Spectrum clones with games tapes and Russian documentation.

These 'Sinclairs' as they were called came in a variety of shapes, colours and designs, and bore little resemblance to their Western counterparts. Motherboards were made unofficially in state electronics plants by under-employed workers. Sinclairs were assembled at home and sold in ones and twos. Vendors vied with each other to tout their latest mods. One of the two Sinclairs we purchased came with a guarantee - a handwritten note with the pinouts of the DIN connector for the tape player, and the telephone number of the teenager who had assembled the device. Cost: the equivalent of $19.

There was clearly a thriving market in home computers. In apparent contradiction, beside the cash till in most shops and hotels was a Russian abacus (schyotti). Calculations were done on the schyotti and the result entered and rung up on the till, even though most of these tills were capable of automatic addition.

When I asked about this curious practice I was told that the lay public was mistrustful of new technology and insisted on the schyotti as a symbol of traditional trusted procedure. Paradoxically, the schyotti is now threatened by rampant inflation - the traditional wooden frames and wire cross- pieces cannot hold enough beads to reckon with the smallest denominations of an increasingly devalued currency.

The leap by Apple Computers from Californian garage to multinational, and the efforts of Jobs and Wozniak in this remarkable saga, are part of the established legend of the personal computer revolution. The drive behind the Californian 'home brew' computer movement in the mid-to-late Seventies was the desire to possess and control your own PC at a time when the smallest available computers were minicomputers at prices largely prohibitive to individuals. It transpires that there was a similar initiative in Russia that started in the early Eighties.

A group of young computer scientists in Novosibirsk wanted their own computers and set about designing and making one. The first processor board (Kronos-1) was cobbled together from Russian-sourced ICs smuggled from various labs. Kronos-1 had 16-bit organisation though the microprogramming was written for 32-bit operation and memory extension to 128K. The processor board was designed to be plugged in to a multi-processor host - typically a PDP-11 Q-bus clone.

By 1985 the plug-in processor was complete as well as a home- grown operating system called Excelsior and a 'Modula 0' cross-assembler. Later developments resulted in a stand-alone Kronos workstation used for off-line software development for the MARS supercomputer project as well as other applications. The parallels with the Apple saga are remarkable though slightly delayed in time.

There is one obvious difference. Unlike the Apple II, the Kronos development did not result in a mass-production consumer product. Only 150 Kronos workstations were built. However, in a local sense, the project succeeded. Each of the team has a Kronos workstation in his home.

Kronos was a male deity worshipped by pre-Hellenic Greeks, and later identified with the Roman god Saturn. On the advice of his mother, Kronos castrated his father and took for his consort his sister Rhea and swallowed five of the children that ensued from the union. His son Zeus was spared from being swallowed when Rhea tricked Kronos into swallowing a stone instead. Zeus grew up and forced Kronos to disgorge his siblings and prevailed over Kronos in battle.

It is tempting to read allegorical significance into the name of the Novosibirsk computer project and I admit speculating that this young renegade team had chosen the name for symbolic reasons. Kronos denied history and disowned the past by castrating his father. This would seem to emphasise the independence of the new initiative and the wish to empower the young team at the expense of the establishment. The triumph of Zeus over Kronos could be seen as the repossession of history by the new generation having been denied by the old guard.

Any pretensions about the value of such speculation was rudely dispelled by the account given of the circumstances in which the project acquired its name. The team was sitting around one night at a loss for a project name and they decided to ask the first person to walk through the door to name the project and to be bound unconditionally by the result. When the friend arrived and was taxed with the task he said, "Kronos", and this was duly adopted. When quizzed the following day for an explanation the friend maintained that he had been seriously drunk, that he had never heard the name Kronos, and could offer no clue to its significance.

This account was corroborated on different occasions by different members of the development team. I tell the story against myself and the dangers of presupposing mythological meanings where none exists.

The Besm range of supercomputers is arguably the most influential series of computers in the history of Soviet computer science. Besms were the workhorses of scientific and military computation and successive generations of programmers used these vast machines.

The prototype Besm-1 dates from 1953 and Besm-6, the last of the line, dates from 1966. The Besm-6 is of particular interest: it is reputedly the last indigenous Russian computer to be performance competitive with its Western contemporary - the Control Data supercomputers from the mid-1960s. Over 350 Besm-6s were built and after 25 years the last of these were being taken out of service in the early 1990s.

The focus of the visit to Novosibirsk was to negotiate for and secure for the Science Museum the last of their four working Besms. The single surviving machine was surrounded by the debris of its predecessors which had been melted down for the salvage value of the precious metal content. In November 1991 the last machine was still operational and the timing of the visit was hastened to preempt the final threatened melt-down for salvage.

The four-Besm system had supported over 300 independent users and had provided a computing service for advanced research for military, space, engineering, meteorological and computer science applications. The installation had been progressively upgraded since its installation and the processor as found was a hybrid germanium/silicon discrete component transistor system with IC memory supporting standard disc and tape storage and an intact roomful of operational punched card equipment.

The negotiations for the Besm were tortuous though ultimately successful. The logistics of getting two 20-foot Euro- containers of equipment out of Siberia in a context of collapsing infrastructure is a tale for another time. The consignment of equipment is now stored in an aircraft hangar at Wroughton in a Science Museum store.

The shipment includes a Kronos workstation, three generations of Kronos processor boards, a PDP-11 cloned host for Kronos, an AGAT personal computer (the Russian Apple II), and a large Russian-made core store. The Besm system constitutes the largest collection of items. This consists of a full Besm processor, power supply cabinets, multiple examples of peripherals, cabling, documentation and spares. A condition of the exchange was that the Besm was to be decommissioned, packed and shipped with a view to its restoration to working order in London.

The intention is for the CCS to restore the Besm to working order in public view with a team of Russian and British engineers, and to conduct the first non-aligned comparative evaluation of Eastern and Western contemporary machines. Sponsorship initiatives are in progress to raise the £40,000 needed for the project. With a more detailed understanding of this seminal Soviet Cold War supercomputer we can perhaps revisit Cold War claims about rumoured Russian technology lag and dispel or confirm some of the myths about our new allies.

Doron Swade is Senior Curator (Computing and Information Processing) at the Science Museum. This article is a condensed and edited version of the talk given by him to the Society at the Museum on 30 September 1993. Technical material and discussion of particular Soviet computers has been omitted.

After the Elliott 400 series

Hugh McGregor Ross

There were three vital characteristics of our work in the fifties. The first was that it was highly innovative; we were aware that work on digital computers was important without knowing or even being much interested in what way it would go. We were launching into the unknown.

The second characteristic was that most workers were young; many were almost straight out of college. Largely as a consequence of this, intensive personal loyalties developed to the leaders of the individual groups. These leaders became for some of us like hero-friends.

The third feature was that each project was markedly new. It was built on the experience of previous projects but was emphatically not a copy, nor were there any considerations of backwards compatibility. That was a concept which had not been invented in those days, though today it is a primary factor in the development of computer technology. But we had no interest, or awareness even, of the importance of looking back to an earlier machine.

I was introduced to the Elliott Brothers Research Laboratories by the Cambridge University Appointments Board, and John Coales became one of my hero-friends. He created a job for me in the Laboratory. I was engaged amongst other projects on a small scale analogue computer; all these involved very high reliability, high performance, conventional electronics for those days.

My laboratory was across the corridor from the laboratory where Bill Elliott was developing the 401. George Felton was assisting me, and we used to travel to and from work together. He would tell me about these new-fangled digital machines and this extraordinary business called programming which I, as an analogue electrical engineer, found all mumbo-jumbo. We became very good friends as a result.

Some of us at the Research Laboratory had very great personal loyalty to John Coales. We recognised the capability of Leon Bagrit; we recognised his technical guidance from Dr Ross, and in no way do I now wish to belittle the great achievements of those two men. However they were as different from John Coales as chalk is from cheese.

We were aware that marked tension was developing between Bagrit and Ross on one hand and John Coales on the other. A particular episode occurred; we had a lunch canteen, and I was sitting there when Coales and Dr Ross came in. I saw Dr Ross hand his coat and hat to Coales in exactly the same way as one would hand a hat and coat to the concierge at the club. I realised as a result of that discourtesy that John Coales' number was up.

That evening I started to seek alternative employment. It took a little time but eventually I approached one of my other hero-friends whom I'd worked under previously, Vivian Bowden. He was a man of fantastically innovative thinking; furthermore he had an extraordinarily penetrating form of thought and he could draw conclusions with extreme vividness and accuracy.

He had been engaged by Sir Vincent Ferranti to join the Ferranti computer department in Manchester. At that time they were working on the engineering development of the Manchester University computer designed by Professor FC Williams, exploiting the CRT high speed storage technique.

So I approached Bowden and he took me into the Ferranti computer department. He had previously been recruiting, and remembering one of his long-term friends, Bernard Swann, had managed to prise him out of a high level in the Civil Service in Whitehall to go to Manchester to work on this new-fangled digital computer. I was appointed as deputy to Swann.

I became a computer man in the same week as the first electronic digital computer was sold commercially anywhere in the world. Bowden, aided by Swann and three or four of the Manchester team, had managed to persuade Shell Petroleum Company that a digital computer would be useful for optimising the movements of their merchant tanker fleet.

I often reflect that in one working lifetime I have seen the progress from the very first commercial sale of all to the position where you can go along to the High Street and buy a computer from somebody who has just been selling sweets. That was the start of the computer business. It had not been a business before then: it had been an academic research activity or a way of finding solutions to military needs.

Bernard Swann soon realised from his experience in Whitehall that trying to sell computers from Manchester was not practical. He decided that a group had to be set up in London, so he shifted me down there. Very soon I was joined by Chris Wilson and Conway Berners-Lee. Chris went on to hold high office in ICL, and Conway still does very valuable work in ICL.

In order to develop this business for computers Swann realised that we had to have a computer centre in London, not just a sales representative, so I was largely involved in setting up the first computer centre. This was at 21 Portland Place, nearly opposite the BBC.

We very soon found that we would have to have software capability in this computer centre, and so I suggested to Swann that George Felton should be approached to join us. By this time John Coales had in fact left Elliott Brothers - my hunch during that lunch-time had proved true - and his leaving produced a great deal of distress. So it was not at all difficult to get George Felton, who also much admired John Coales, to come to Ferranti.

As another by-product of Coales' departure, Bill Elliott also left Elliott Laboratories. He had gone to Cambridge University along with the 401, and so I suggested to Bernard Swann that it might be very good for Ferranti if we could get Bill to join us.

This was exceedingly tricky because it was obvious to everybody that Brian Pollard, engineer in charge and general manager of the Ferranti computer activity in Manchester, and Bill Elliott would never mix. Often as I was living through the consequences of this I used to think to myself "the moon cannot stand the sun".

So a device was thought of to establish a laboratory for Bill Elliott in London. When he went for interview with Brian Pollard I, as the only person in Ferranti who knew Bill, was deputed to meet him in Manchester and escort him to the interview. It all went all right until at the last moment, Pollard unnecessarily and meanly insulted him.

As we came out of the interview Bill said "What does that mean?". I was just beginning to be a salesman then, and I had to do some very slick sales talk to persuade Bill to stay with us. It must have succeeded because he did join us.

In doing so he brought several of his colleagues from Elliott Brothers, and the one who is particularly remembered is the late Charles Owen. He also engaged engineers from other walks of life because you must remember that there was nothing like a computer industry - the business had only been going about six months. I would particularly mention Brian Maudseley and Ian Merry.

The NRDC had been supporting Bill Elliott's work on the 401 at Elliott Brothers, and they were certainly interested in promoting the development of package computers. So they agreed to underwrite the development of 10 new machines by Ferranti to be developed by Bill with the London team. I want to emphasise that this was a true new development, a genuine advance on the 401, building on Bill's experience; it was not a transfer of the Elliott Brothers design.

A crucial factor in NRDC's arrangements with Ferranti was that Christopher Strachey should have influence over the design of the new machine in order to meet programmers' needs. Again and again Christopher Strachey would suggest that some or other fancy new feature had to be provided.

Bill Elliott was primarily concerned to ensure that a really good engineering machine should be made, which could be made quickly, easily, cheaply and above all should be reliable. So whenever Christopher Strachey asked for a new feature, it clashed with interests which were paramount for Bill Elliott.

Bill says he doesn't remember there being fierce tussles between himself and Christopher Strachey, but I do. They were quite intense, as both men were of the highest calibre who would never give way and would stick to their principles. In the event Bill always came up with a satisfactory engineering solution to Strachey's requirements.

George Felton became Christopher Strachey's in-house right hand man. While he'd been at Elliott Brothers he'd met Peter Hunt who was exploring the use of digital computers at de Havilland Aircraft at Hatfield. I also knew Peter, so it was not too difficult for us to propose to Bernard Swann that Peter should be invited to join the Ferranti software group in London. So we then had in-house these two highly able software people, both of whom have gone on to hold high positions in ICL.

So that is how there came about the split of digital computing activity from a single line in Elliott Brothers to two lines in Ferranti and Elliott Brothers. The people I've mentioned were the key players: everything centred around them.

As they built up groups of men and women to support them, these groups centred their attention and their loyalties on their respective leaders. All this work was intensely related to personalities and the intangible qualities of inspiration and enthusiasm.

The work at Ferranti on package computers became Pegasus, which in my view was the most seminal computer of all time. It led to Pegasus 2, evolved to suit commercial applications better, and then Perseus.

Particularly from experience gained on Perseus, George Felton was able to develop ideas which went into the later Ferranti Orion 1 and 2 computers. Those ideas were particularly associated with the operating system.

Orion 1 used a very poor kind of package, but Orion 2 was really good and had without question far and away the most advanced operating system and facility for simultaneous programming of any computer of its time.

Together all this determined many of the crucial features of the ICL 1900 range, and much of Pegasus can even be seen in the 2900 range. The software capability of Orion 2 led in due course to the George operating systems, which in my experience were very much better than the IBM operating systems. Indeed I consider that it was better basic software which enabled ICL to keep its head up in competition with IBM. All of that can be traced back to the work on Pegasus, and particularly the software side introduced by Christopher Strachey.

There's a last vital point I must make. From his experience in Government, Bernard Swann thought it important that prospective customers for computers - and remember that we were building up a computer business - should themselves learn how to use these new machines.

This was a revolutionary idea, and quite contrary to the idea of a computing service where people bring their work in for say Ferranti or Elliott to do the work for them. The idea was that people who knew their own work should come in and get their feet wet with computing. No doubt Bernard Swann was actively supported in this by Vivian Bowden who had extraordinarily farsighted vision.

This concept was only realisable because of two particular qualities of Pegasus, which were at the time unique. The first was its engineering reliability.

I have a note in my diary saying "11 o'clock, 6th March 1956, Pegasus handed over to users". My memory is that on that day Brian Maudesley and Ian Merry had been doing the final engineering checkout on the machine and they said "Right; now it's for you to allow the users to come in on it". That meant that George Felton and Peter Hunt had full time on it and that we as sales representatives could bring in people from outside to try to use the machine.

The second unique feature was its ease of programming. It's only because of that that we had any hope at all of getting people from outside to try their hand at it. George Felton and

Peter Hunt particularly put great effort into training not only our own staff but also customers. This could only be implemented because of these qualities of this machine that we'd got, qualities that were absolutely fundamental to the creation of the computer business.

This article is an edited version of a talk given by the author as part of the Elliott/Pegasus all-day seminar at the Science Museum on 21 May 1992.

Working Party Reports

Elliott 401

Chris Burton, Chairman

The conservation of the sub-units of the system is expected to be completed soon, whereupon everything will be transported to the Elliott room at Blythe House.

Some progress has been made with elucidation of the logic diagrams; this is more and more bound up with understanding and refining the definition of the order code. The work has been helped by input from members who were once programmers for the machine.

Collection of as much drum track data as we think possible is now complete. Regrettably, one track has been damaged due to collapse of a speck of dirt which allowed the head to touch the drum surface. Preliminary analysis of the coding of the Initial Orders on Track 0 has started activity towards a fuller annotated description and understanding of their function.

A large three-phase Variac has been acquired for the Society, which will be used initially for the systematic recommissioning of the power supply system.

North West Group Pegasus

Charlie Portman, Chairman

The Working Party has now been set up and is in operation. Membership is Adrian Cornforth, George Roylance, Ken Turner, Keith Wood and myself.

The first meeting took place on 18 January. This involved induction into the Museum's health and safety procedures, as well as a briefing on conservation produres and standards. After these necessary preliminaries, we started planning our "attack" on the Pegasus conservation project.

DEC

Adrian Johnstone, Chairman

Work will soon begin in our new home as a result of the Museum's agreement to allow Working Party Chairmen to act as surrogate curators.

We have been offered a PDP-11/70 and some other VAX and PDP-11 kit which Tony plans to find space for at Bletchley Park. The catch is that the equipment is presently on board a ship moored on the Victoria Embankment, and can only be unloaded when the tide is right!

One of the aims of the Society is to interest young people in these fine old machines so that technical expertise can be passed on to a new generation. I have formed a group of interested students at London University, who are learning how to drive old DEC systems and who will in time, I hope, develop new applications for them which will interest the general public as well as contemporary users of the machines.

In particular, we hope to make use of the speech synthesiser on our PDP-12, and some of my students are interfacing a speech synthesiser of our own design to a PDP-11. We are also restoring an array procesor for image processing complete with camera which runs with an LSI-11/23. We hope that the combination of speech and vision will enliven future Open Days.

Forthcoming Events

9-10 April 1994, and fortnightly thereafter Guided tours and exhibition at Bletchley Park, price £2.00

For details see Society News.

19 May 1994 All day seminar

The design and development of the IBM 360 series, starting 11.00 am at the Science Museum. (To be confirmed)

14 or 21 June 1994 North West Group meeting

"How on earth did we ever manage to make the hardware useable?"

September 1994 North West Group meeting

Highlights from the best of the London meetings.

December 1994 North West Group meeting

The transition from valve to sold state machines.

The North West Group meetings will be held in the Science Museum Conference Room, Manchester, at 5.30 pm. Details of speakers and of precise dates will be notified to members when plans have been finalised.

Committee of the Society

[The printed version carries contact details of committee members]

Chairman   Graham Morris FBCS
Secretary   Tony Sale FBCS
Treasurer   Dan Hayton
Science Museum representative   Doron Swade
Chairman, Elliott 803 Working Party   John Sinclair
Chairman, Elliott 401 and Pegasus Working Parties   Chris Burton FBCS
Chairman, DEC Working Party   Dr Adrian Johnstone CEng, MIEE, MBCS
Chairman, S100 bus Working Party   Robin Shirley
Chairman, North West Group:   Peter Hall
Editor, Resurrection   Nicholas Enticknap
Archivist   Harold Gearing FBCS

Dr Martin Campbell-Kelly
George Davis CEng FBCS
Professor Sandy Douglas CBE FBCS
Chris Hipwell
Dr Roger Johnson FBCS
Ewart Willey FBCS
Pat Woodroffe

Aims and objectives

The Computer Conservation Society (CCS) is a co-operative venture between the British Computer Society and the Science Museum of London.

The CCS was constituted in September 1989 as a Specialist Group of the British Computer Society (BCS). It thus is covered by the Royal Charter and charitable status of the BCS.

The aims of the CCS are to

• Promote the conservation of historic computers
• Develop awareness of the importance of historic computers
• Encourage research on historic computers

Membership is open to anyone interested in computer conservation and the history of computing.

The CCS is funded and supported by, a grant from the BCS, fees from corporate membership, donations, and by the free use of Science Museum facilities. Membership is free but some charges may be made for publications and attendance at seminars and conferences.

There are a number of active Working Parties on specific computer restorations and early computer technologies and software. Younger people are especially encouraged to take part in order to achieve skills transfer.

The corporate members who are supporting the Society are Bull HN Information Systems, Digital Equipment, ICL, Unisys and Vaughan Systems.