Title: The ICL - Fujitsu Technology Collaboration Speakers: Tom Hinchliffe and John Vernon Date: Tue 18th March 2008 Time: 17:30 Room open in advance (from 17:00) meet up with society members. Location: The Conference Centre. Manchester Museum of Science and Industry, Liverpool Road, Manchester. M3 4FP   and again on   Date: 15th January 2009 Time: 14.30 Room is open from 14.00 - meet up with society members Location: Fellows Library of the Science Museum, Exhibition Road, London, SW7 2DD

About the seminar

The ICL-Fujitsu agreement of October 1981 was an innovative solution to the challenge ICL faced in developing advanced mainframe products with limited R&D and technology resources. The resulting collaboration in the 1980s is a classic example of technology transfer and intercept, and had outstanding business benefits for both organisations. The collaboration enabled ICL to deliver a new generation of UK produced mainframes (the Series 39 range) from 1985 onwards.

The talk will be in three parts – and includes historic photographs and original period slides.

Introductory Overview

• Why a technology collaboration was essential to ICL
• The changes in ICL management at top level, and the business position
• The overall ICL/Fujitsu collaboration agreements, and the intercept of Fujitsu technology in ICL projects
  

The office mainframe project (DM1, known later as Level 30) - John Vernon

• The technology and intercept opportunity - CMOS and gate arrays
• The development cycle and problems of collaborating half way around the world
• The ICL Design Automation innovations, and the development flow from design to chip masks
• The new small mainframe product released in 1985 - and reference to the follow-up machines.
  

The large mainframe project (S3L, known later as Level 80) - Tom Hinchliffe

• The technology opportunity - ECL chips and Cube technology.
• Nodal system design – multiprocessor configurations with fibre interconnect - scaleable and resilient
• Advanced Design Automation systems bridging the world - development routes to get right-first-time
• A range of mainframe configurations – fully compatible and with one operating system (VME)
• Released in 1985 as the Series 39 range. Successfully sold 3 times the target quantity
• The follow-up in the mainframe marketplace – comparisons with Amdahl and IBM machines
  

The talks will take around 2 hours, followed by questions and discussion.

About the Speakers

Tom Hinchliffe and John Vernon are from the CCS North West Group based in Manchester. At the time of the initial collaboration, Tom was the Project Manager of the S3L Large Mainframe Project (Estriel), and John was the Senior Technologist for the Office Mainframe Project (DM1).

Both Tom and John had distinguished careers in ICL, in the High Performance Systems division at West Gorton in Manchester. Tom was appointed an ICL director in 1985 until his retirement in 1996, and continued as a director of Fujitsu Systems Europe until 2001.

Background

For more see this Wikipedia entry on the ICL Series 39. That also gives links to more detailed information.

Click to see a podcast of the event