[SIGCIS-Members] FW: Were any early computers completed on schedule?

Thomas Haigh thaigh at computer.org
Tue Jan 14 15:52:35 PST 2014


[Another contribution to this discussion]

-----Original Message-----
From: Roger Neil Barton [mailto:neil.barton at uclmail.net] 
Sent: Tuesday, January 14, 2014 9:47 AM
To: Ceruzzi, Paul; 'Brian Randell'; thaigh at computer.org
Cc: members at sigcis.org
Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Were any early computers completed on
schedule?

Tom,

Just to echo Paul's comment.

I joined ICL mainframe manufacturing division in West Gorton, Manchester as
Financial Controller (FC) in the mid 70s.  As you know ICL was a combination
of Ferranti, ICT, and English Electric.  West Gorton and its satellite
Dukinfield were in all but name Ferranti, responsible for design and
manufacture with a continuing Ferranti corporate culture.  All the FCs
throughout manufacturing were replaced at the same time and we all recruited
from the automobile industry which operated with annual model changes.  More
particularly the auto industry operated with engineering changes that were
documented right through the company and they wanted people used to these
procedures.  Finance was a very powerful function but within my team we had
graduate engineers, chemists, physicists, and mathematicians and so were not
really bean counters.

What I found when I joined was that every machine on the shop floor was
different with design engineers feeling free to come downstairs and give
instructions to the shop floor personnel even retrospectively amend the
design spec, but not because the customer had wanted something different. 
As far as the design engineers were concerned this gave the customer the
benefit of their latest thinking.  It had never occurred to them that these
changes had cost (and therefore profit) implications.  As I knew that was
why I and my colleagues had been recruited I implemented a system of formal
engineering changes that could be implemented at regular intervals.  The
2900 range was the first range where the product could be said to be
'finished' before it began production.

kind regards
neil
PS I don't think my submissions are accepted by sigcis so perhaps you would
be kind enough to post it for me.

Dr Roger Neil Barton


-----Original Message-----
From: Ceruzzi, Paul
Sent: Tuesday, January 14, 2014 2:01 PM
To: 'Brian Randell' ; thaigh at computer.org
Cc: <members at sigcis.org>
Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Were any early computers completed on
schedule?

Thanks, Brian. In America we would say that the Colossus is the Rodney
Dangerfield of computers -- it does not get the respect it deserves.

One issue that I have is that for most early computers (and complex
technology in general), there was no such thing as being "finished" on a
certain date.  Perhaps with the exception of the Colossus, they all eased
themselves into operation. So it is not clear when to assign a date of
completion, as much as people want to do that.

Paul E. Ceruzzi
Chair, Division of Space History
National Air & Space Museum
MRC 311; PO Box 37012
Washington, DC 20013-7012
202-633-2414
<http://www.nasm.si.edu/staffDetail.cfm?staffID=24>

-----Original Message-----
From: members-bounces at sigcis.org [mailto:members-bounces at sigcis.org] On
Behalf Of Brian Randell
Sent: Tuesday, January 14, 2014 6:06 AM
To: thaigh at computer.org
Cc: <members at sigcis.org>
Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Were any early computers completed on
schedule?

Hi Tom:

The first Colossus was built on the initiative of Tommy Flowers at the Post
Office Research Station, and was completed in eleven months, becoming
operational there in December 1943, before being moved to  Bletchley Park
where it was placed into service in early 1944. Soon after this he and his
team were "asked" to make a dozen further machines, which were wanted by
June 1944! This was plainly impossible, but Flowers undertook to try to get
the first production, or Mark 2, Colossus ready by that date, and further
ones ready at about one month intervals. (The Mark 2 Colossus machines
involved a major redesign and through the use of parallelism were five times
faster than the initial machine.)

To quote my paper, at the 1976 Los Alamos conference on the History of
Computing on Colossus: "By 31 May [the first Mark 2 Colossus] was nearly
complete. Flowers, Broadhurst, Chandler, Coombs and Saville were all at
Bletchley Park, but they could not get the machine to work. Eventually, in
the early hours of 1 June, the others went home to get some sleep, leaving
Chandler to work on, since the trouble was in the part he had redesigned. In
his words, "The whole system was in a state of violent parasitic oscillation
at a frequency outside the range of our oscilloscopes [and then] by way of
diversion, at about 3.00 a.m. a nearby radiator started leaking, sending a
pool of warm water towards the equipment!". He eventually found a means of
curing the problem and at nearly 4.00 a.m. left Norman Thurlow, one of the
maintenance engineers, to finish the required rewiring. The others others
arrived back at 8.30 a.m. to find that the machine was working. The deadline
had been beaten - and it was just five days to D-day, 6 June 1944!" 
[https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v1/url?u=http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/publicat
ions/books/papers/133.pdf&k=diZKtJPqj4jWksRIF4bjkw%3D%3D%0A&r=iEx95BOSDrL1Sb
ShZgBAew%3D%3D%0A&m=tfHMe3JuD9T32JpBQY0J1zbPYDidGqKq6g8doPfgbqs%3D%0A&s=50ad
56df86049bc505ab2fa438adf88a8bbc98d2fa7a830b33f8a8d0f4d832a3]

By the end of the war, at least ten Colossi were operational at Bletchley
Park.

So the answer to your question about Colossus is an emphatic "yes".

Cheers

Brian


On 13 Jan 2014, at 17:17, Thomas Haigh <thaigh at computer.org>
wrote:

> Hello,
>
> For my ongoing project on ENIAC I've written a sentence SEAC, another 
> early computer, that includes the words "..although finished well 
> behind schedule, like all early computers.".
>
> It's been suggested to me that several Colossus computers were in fact 
> finished on schedule. Does anyone know if this is true?
>
> Also, are there any other examples of early digital computers of the 
> 1940s or earlier reaching reliable operation more or less on the 
> schedule promised to the people funding them? Delays to ENIAC, EDVAC, 
> the IAS computer, ACE, Univac, the Manchester Mark 1, the  Harvard 
> Mark 1, and of course Babbage's Difference Engine are well documented.
>
> I can always change "all" to "most" but this is now making me curious.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Tom
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