The Computer Conservation Society has announced its programme of meetings for Spring 2009, and includes talks being given by ICL people covering significant achievements in UK computing. ICL pensioners who worked in the areas covered are particularly welcome to attend and contribute to the discussion at the meetings.

The January 15th meeting in London is on The ICL–Fujitsu Technology Collaboration – the speakers are Tom Hinchliffe and John Vernon.

The ICL-Fujitsu agreement of October 1981 was an innovative solution to the challenge ICL faced in developing advanced mainframe products with limited R&D and technology resources. The resulting collaboration in the 1980s is a classic example of technology transfer and intercept, and had outstanding business benefits for both organisations. The collaboration enabled ICL to deliver a new generation of UK produced mainframes (the Series 39 range) from 1985 onwards.

Tom Hinchliffe and John Vernon were responsible for the ICL mainframe projects at West Gorton resulting from this collaboration. Their talks will cover the overall technology collaboration, the hardware development projects for new `office’ mainframes and for large mainframes, the resulting successful products, and the significance in the mainframe business at the time for ICL.

For more details click here.

The January 20th meeting in Manchester is on Some CAFS applications – the speakers are Hamish Carmichael and Martin Wright.

The Content Addressable File Store (CAFS) was an innovative development by ICL. It was a unique hardware search engine, with remarkable capabilities, and was used in a wide variety of applications in the 1980’s. Hamish Carmichael and Martin Wright worked on major applications that exploited CAFS, and will give and overview of these – including some interesting stories.

For more details click here.

The February 19th meeting in London is a Seminar on EMI computers – A Reminder – the speakers are Keith Crook and Michael Knight.

EMI was one of the UK companies developing computers in the late 1950’s – and produced the Emidec 1100 and Emidec 2400 computers. The scene will be set by an fascinating EMI promotional film from 1961, and then the computers will be described by two of the original EMI team, Keith Crook and Michael Knight.

EMI became part of ICT in July 1962. Many EMI people continued careers in computing in ICL, and it is hoped that a number of ex EMI people will attend.

For more details click here.

To view the full programme of Computer Conservation Society events click here.

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