One of my tutors at UCT was J M Coetzee who taught a course in generative grammar which included insights into how this field had affected the evolution of the design of compilers etc. Coetzee had worked on advanced programming projects in Britain during the 60's. During the day he worked on various programs on the Atlas 2 Super Computer, including running aerodynamic simulations of the TSR2 aircraft on the machine at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Aldermaston.jimtherev wrote: ↑Sun Oct 04, 2020 10:06 pmHarwell had a LEO - or something very close to one - and my then fiancée wrote programs for it in '58 or '59 it must have been. Being low-priority - fast breeder reactors were still a bit in the future - she could only get machine time after 22:00, so we used to schlep in together for a few hours whilst the programs ran. Nice and quiet & not much to do - well, not computing, anyway.
Eventually skirted staff were banned from the computer suite: the fashion was then for wide-skirted 'frocks' with lots of petticoats, and so much static electricity was there that the machine frequently crashed. (Crashed quite often without human interference, for that matter) And so, since she was of the persuasion which would not wear trousers, our happy midnight hours ceased.
Other abiding memory was the ferrite core store - all 16k of it - which occupied a portable building about 20 ft by 10 ft.
Ferranti sold two other Atlas installations, one to a joint consortium of London University and British Petroleum in 1963, and another to the Atomic Energy Research Establishment (Harwell) in December 1964. The AEA machine was later moved to the Atlas Computer Laboratory at Chilton, a few yards outside the boundary fence of Harwell, which placed it on civilian lands and thus much easier to access. This installation grew to be the largest Atlas, containing 48 kWords of 48-bit core memory and 32 tape drives. Time was made available to all UK universities. It was shut down in March 1974.
In February 1962, Ferranti gave some parts of an Atlas machine to Cambridge University, and in return, the University would use these to develop a cheaper version of the system. The result was the Titan machine, which became operational in the summer of 1963. Ferranti sold two more of this design under the name Atlas 2, one to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (Aldermaston) in 1963, and another to the government-sponsored Computer Aided Design Center in 1966.