About the seminar

This talk will cover how several developments were brought together in the period up to the launch of the 1900 series in September 1964 - to produce a fully compatible range of UK manufactured computers replacing the varied set of individual computers that the ICT company had inherited from mergers in the UK computer industry or bought in from the USA.

First Alan will describe the events and early developments in Ferranti at Bracknell and Manchester that led to a new medium size computer being developed in Toronto by Ferranti-Packard, the FP-6000. The Canadian team had substantial experience developing and delivering real time computer systems.

John will outline their history and visits in 1963 to investigate adopting the FP-6000 in Ferranti in the UK. He took part in one and will tell us about the Canadian project and his experience. An anglicised version of the FP-6000 became "the 1900 computer".

Then Alan will describe the portfolio of products in ICT during 1963 and what happened to adopt and extend the original 1900 computer into a range of compatible machines - with larger and with smaller models. ICT needed to do that to respond to the IBM 360 range, and grow the UK computer hardware manufacturing industry.

A number of developments were brought together involving development teams at Manchester (ex Ferranti) and at Stevenage (ex EMI and ICT teams) to produce the initial range to a challenging timescale. The deadline was to enable ICT to launch "the I.C.T. 1900 Series" on 29^th September 1964. The range of computers announced worldwide with much publicity had 7 models and examples were shown working at the Business Efficiency exhibition the following week - a 1904 system with multi-programming and a smaller 1903 system. Some ICT film material from the time will be shown during the talk. The talk will be followed by comments from people who worked on the 1900 development and discussion.

About the speaker

Both Alan Thomson and John Buckle were recent graduates when they started their careers with Ferranti in the early 1960s and joined ICT when the Ferranti Computer Department was sold to ICT in September 1963. They worked in system and software development throughout the life of the 1900 range.

Background

The CCS held a full day seminar on the 1900 range in London in May 1996. That covered the life of the range, with talks from leading figures in the ICL company. A further seminar was held in Manchester in April 1967. Most of the talks were subsequently written up Resurrection - see articles in the issues from 16 to 22.

An authoritative website on the ICT/ICL 1900 range is maintained by Virgilio Pasquali at http://homepage.ntlworld.com/v.pasquali/. That includes a list of references including pointers to online versions of the articles in Resurrection. The Wikipedia page on the "ICT 1900 Series" repeats much of Virgilio´s information.