By Simon Lavington
The Elliott-Automation corporation used to be an lively player within the delivery of the knowledge agein Britain. By 1961, the corporate used to be providing 50% of the electronic desktops brought to united kingdom clients in that year. but by means of the tip of that decade, Elliott-Automation had successfully disappeared in a flurry of takeovers, leaving little obvious hint of the technical excellence that had as soon as characterized the identify Elliott.
Moving Targetscharts the slow take-up of knowledge know-how in Britain, as obvious during the eyes of 1 cutting edge corporation. The ebook examines how the sunrise of the electronic desktop age in Britain happened at a number of instances for various functions, from early government-sponsored paintings on mystery defence tasks, to the expansion of the marketplace for Elliott desktops for civil applications.
Topics and features:
- Charts the institution of Elliott’s Borehamwood examine Laboratories in 1946, and the jobs performed via John Coales and Leon Bagrit in reviving an in poor health company
- Examines early Elliott electronic desktops designed for labeled army functions and for GCHQ, resembling the Elliott 152, 153 and OEDIPUS
- Describes the analogue desktops built by means of Elliott-Automation, together with the large TRIDAC
- Reviews the improvement of the 1st advertisement Elliott pcs, the expansion of purposes in business automation, and the contest provided by way of rival brands in Britain
- Includes a heritage of airborne desktops as much as 1988, written by way of a former director of Elliott Flight Automation
- Discusses the evolution of machine architectures and structures software program for the Elliott 800, 900 and 4100 sequence computers
- Investigates the mergers, takeovers and eventual closure of the Borehamwood laboratories, and the dying of Elliott-Automation and its successors, ICL and GEC
This detailed textual content might be of serious curiosity to historians of know-how and company, and also will entice the overall reader excited about the emergence of electronic computing in Britain and the paintings of the formerly unsung computing device pioneers of the Elliott-Automation laboratories at Borehamwood.
Simon Lavington is Emeritus Professor of desktop technological know-how on the college of Essex. between his many courses is the publication Early British Computers.
Read Online or Download Moving Targets: Elliott-Automation and the Dawn of the Computer Age in Britain, 1947 – 67 PDF
Similar history & culture books
Virtual Freedom: Net Neutrality and Free Speech in the Internet Age
Communications giants like Google, Comcast, and AT&T get pleasure from more and more unchecked keep watch over over speech. As companies of broadband entry and net se's, they could regulate on-line expression. Their on-line content material restrictions—from obstructing e mail to censoring cablecasts—are thought of felony due to fresh adjustments in loose speech legislation.
This is often an review of dualistic pondering within the Qumran fabric written by way of top individuals within the mild of 2 a long time of Qumran examine. the significance of dualistic considering in the ''Dead Sea Scrolls'' has continually been emphasized in ''Qumran Studies''. however, within the final 20 years the learn on Qumran dualism turns out to were at the margins of scholarly curiosity.
Beyond Deep Blue: Chess in the Stratosphere
Greater than a decade has handed on the grounds that IBM’s Deep Blue desktop surprised the realm through defeating Garry Kasparov, the realm chess champion at the moment. Following Deep Blue’s retirement, there was a succession of higher and higher chess taking part in desktops, or chess engines, and this present day there's little doubt that the world’s most sensible engines are better on the online game than the world’s top human gamers.
Access Controlled. The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace
Stories on a brand new iteration of web controls that identify a brand new normative terrain within which surveillance and censorship are regimen.
- The lost world of scripture : ancient literary culture and biblical authority
- Computer Speech: Recognition, Compression, Synthesis
- Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History
- Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, then Ignored, the First Personal Computer
Extra resources for Moving Targets: Elliott-Automation and the Dawn of the Computer Age in Britain, 1947 – 67
Sample text
For lathes and other machine tools. • S S White industrial Abrasive Units. 24 1 The Navy Comes to Borehamwood • Beam switches, operating for tension or compression. • Load cells used for testing jet engine thrust. As an outward sign of the change in fortunes that Bagrit had brought to both Lewisham and Borehamwood, the marketing name of Elliott Brothers (London) Ltd. was effectively changed to Elliott-Automation Ltd. in the summer of 1957. Under Leon Bagrit’s energetic expansion of the Elliott-Automation enterprise, the total people employed at the Century Works was to rise to about 2,000 by the mid1960s, thereafter falling in response to mergers and takeovers.
Elphinstone came from an aristocratic Scottish family and was well connected in government circles. He had a thorough training in electrical engineering which was to bear fruit in many successful patent applications. He was active in the development of gunnery-related equipment and allied instrumentation for the Navy and was knighted at the conclusion of the First World War. 5. At that time, there were between 200 and 300 employees. 4 Enter the Instrument Makers 15 It is worth emphasising the importance of Elphinstone to the Elliott company.
Launched in 1938, HMS Belfast remained in service until 1963. She is on public view near Tower Bridge in London went to Vickers at Crayford and Metro-Vick. MRS5 (radar type 905 with a projected wavelength of 3 cm) went to Elliott Research Laboratories at Borehamwood. Good progress was made on MRS3, which is believed to have gone into service with the Royal Navy in the early 1950s. By the late 1940s, work on MRS4 had been abandoned, leaving MRS5 as an important research project involving J F Coales at ASE and, as we shall see, after 1946 at the Borehamwood Laboratories.