About the seminar

At its inauguration in 1962, Atlas represented a significant advance in scientific computing power. Indeed, it has been called the greatest British supercomputer. Yet the project´s initiation at Manchester University in 1956 was surrounded by funding uncertainties and by 1963 Ferranti Ltd. had lost its mainframe interests to ICT. This talk will set Atlas in its historical context, taking a retrospective view of the highs and lows of this innovative machine and its many users.

About the speaker

Professor Simon Lavington was a research student at Manchester when Atlas became operational. He developed hardware and software for Atlas for automatic speech recognition. He later moved to the University of Essex to work on hardware support for knowledge-based systems. He is the author of several books on computer history and is one of the leading members of the Society.

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