4. WORKING PARTY PROCEDURE ADOPTED BY THE TECHNICAL GROUP

The Technical Group met eight times between 10 March and 3 October 1975. At its first meeting the Group decided to facilitate its work by:

1. Appointing an external consultant.
2. Setting up a Software Sub-Group to advise it on matters of software and services.

Mr R W Evans of Evans and Associates was appointed consultant to the Group and Mr J W Burren of the Rutherford Laboratory was appointed to assist him from within SRC. Mr Evans and Mr Burren were asked to make visits to potential users in university engineering departments and to determine in detail the requirements of these users and to report these to the Group. They were also asked to visit computer manufacturers to assess the equipment available for meeting the computing requirements.

They made visits to the following universities and polytechnics in the UK:

• Cambridge
• Edinburgh
• Imperial College (2 visits)
• Leeds Polytechnic
• Leicester
• Manchester
• Newcastle
• Salford
• Southampton
• Strathclyde
• UMIST

and also visited NEL, CADC, the Post Office (CAD Development Section) and Daresbury Laboratory.

At each university, engineers from various departments were interviewed about the computing activities associated with their research work. In addition general discussions were held on the best methods of meeting engineers' computing requirements. The numbers of engineers interviewed and the research workers and students these represented are given in Table 4.1.

The Technical Group gratefully acknowledges the assistance that was provided by all those who participated in the discussions with Mr Evans and Mr Burren.

TABLE 4.1: Numbers of Engineers interviewed at UK Universities

Appendix 3 gives details of the subjects covered by each visit.

Six manufacturers of large computers (CDC, DEC, Honeywell, IBM, ICL and UNIVAC) were visited and possible configurations for time-sharing applications were discussed. Two manufacturers of small machines (DEC and GEC) were also visited.

In order to scale up the requirement obtained from the sample of engineering users interviewed by Mr Evans and Mr Burren, a questionnaire was sent to all university and polytechnic engineering departments to ascertain staff and student populations (See Section 5.2).

In addition to the UK visits, Mr Evans and Mr Burren, together with two members of the Group (Dr Barney and Dr Butlin), made a two-week tour to the USA (from 8-20 June 1975) visiting university departments and government and industrial establishments. Each person submitted a report of the visit.

The Software Sub-Group under Professor F Walkden held 6 meetings during the period 7 April 1975 to 15 July 1975. The Sub-Group reported regularly to the main Group and recommendations from the Sub-Group are contained within the body of this report.