ICF -- Overview

The main breakdown of this section is:

Engineering Board Report

Often called the Rosenbrock Report, this was a significant activity over a 2-year period that came to some forward-looking proposals for engineering research in the UK.

Phase 1

Mainly aimed at providing some short-term improvement in facilities and assessing the need.

Multi User Minis (MUMs)

The belief was that engineering research should move from mainframe computers to the newly emerging powerful mini computers able to support 6-10 researchers in a range of interactive tasks from file editing to Computer Aided Design. Considerable involvement with two companies, Prime and GEC, came about through this activity. There were also a number of software products that came out of this collaboration.

Terminals

The quality of terminal equipment in engineering departments was woefully inadequate and a major theme was to provide a variety of terminals from simple VDUs to interactive graphical displays as a central pool.

Special Interest Groups (SIGs)

The main thrust was improving engineering research. The Science Board of SRC had successfully persuaded their researchers to share basic software libraries and a similar approach was proposed for the engineering sector. Seven main areas of engineering were addressed.

The Interactive Computing Facility was started in 1975 and ran until 1990.