I remember being taken on a tour around Atlas as part of my college course.
It must have been about 1967/8.
I went back to work at Harwell (RRD next door to Chilton or Rutherford
Labs as it was called)
when I returned from Germany in 1971.
My job was to interface a PDP8/e to a triple axis neutron defractometer.
The 8/e only did data reduction and display.
I had already built a dedicated hardware system to do the positioning
and stepping.
The BF3 counter gave a signal proportion to amplitude and the stepping
controller the three position co-ordinates.
Result a 3D display of the scattered neutron pattern. What was it for?
Finding out the structure of crystals.
We also had a straight 8 doing data processsing.
Rod
On 05/07/2015 09:47, Dave G4UGM wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-boun...@classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Chuck
Guzis
Sent: 05 July 2015 04:14
To: gene...@classiccmp.org; discuss...@classiccmp.org:On-Topic and Off-
Topic Posts
Subject: Re: Computing history at CERN - Re: what IBM system is this?
On 07/04/2015 08:07 PM, Brent Hilpert wrote:
Note that that room is just for DD division machines - general
computing services: data processing, number crunching, external
networking, etc.
At the time, the accelerator control was being done by Norsk-Data
minis located in the accelerator control room, as shown and explained
to me by someone who had worked on their programming; and there were
machines all over the rest of the site associated with things like
data-collection from experiment sensors, assorted labs, etc. I recall
for instance, seeing a VAX-750 doing sensor data-collection, and a lab
filled with some graphics machines, but don't recall what type they
were.
Does anyone know of similar photos being taken at approximately the same
time at LLL or LANL? I assume that there might also be some from NASA
Langley...
Photos from other heavy-duty number-crunching installations of the time,
such
as ECMWF would also be interesting.
--Chuck
There are some pictures on the Chilton site:-
http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acl/technology/atlas/overview.htm
but they are hard to find...
Dave
