About the seminar

A complementary prequel to my article ‘Memories of Maximop development’ published in Resurrection Number 59 in Autumn 2012. This talk will concentrate on a (system) programmer’s view of the 1900 range architectures. First looking at the basic and extended hardware architectures and instruction sets available, and then the operating systems’ facilities available to developers.

The final section will focus on how and why these facets influenced many of the technical design decisions we made in order to implement the Maximop operating system to replace ICL’s Minimop offering as the College’s high volume lightweight teaching and research multi-access platform.

About the speaker

By the time Arthur had graduated in ‘Mathematics with Computer Science’ from Queen Mary College (University of London) in 1969, he had already learnt Algol 60 on the London Atlas and was an accomplished PLAN programmer on the College’s ICL 1905E – having joined the Computer Centre as a ‘vacations’ programmer in 1968, and immediately written the punched cards-based Student Registration suite (under which he had to register himself for his final year). Soon becoming Senior Programmer in the Systems Team and then the Maximop development group in 1970 – a role that continued until 1976, by then as Chief Programmer.

Click to see a podcast of this event.