The newly constituted Central Computing Committee (CCC) set up a Single User System Steering Group (SUSSG) in April 1982 to oversee the Common Base Policy and the ICL/SERC Memorandum of Understanding.
Its terms of reference were:
Two members of CCC, Professor W Newman and Professor C McGreavy, were members of the SUSSG. There were 4 other members to represent EB interests and one representative from each of the other Boards. The Science Board representative was Dr M Elder of the Daresbury Laboratory, supported by Dr E Owen also of DL.
The SUSSG met three times in 1982 on:
The Science Board was represented at all three meetings.
The initial meeting had a lot of ground to cover including a great deal of Commercial in Confidence background material which has been given in this report.
These were accepted after clarifications of a number of points. It was agreed that SUSSG would give CCC a written report of progress at each CCC meeting and this was done. It was agreed that the SERC Boards should be asked to ratify their representatives at the CCC meeting. The JNT were invited to be a member of SUSSG.
RAL provided SUSSG with a long Progress Report giving the complete history of the project. Major points arising from that are given below:
SERC Central Office were still insisting that any increase in manpower on the project should be obtained by getting committee approval for Collaborative Research Proposals with ICL.
Two possible projects were discussed, a portable GKS implementation, and a quality window manager. It was agreed that the Collaborative Grant was inappropriate for the first, due to it not being research, and the savings in licences by RAL for each PERQ recouped any effort put in on the project. The window manager proposal should go to CCC for assessment after some changes had been made.
The Five Year Forward Look provided by CCC had a flat 5 MY per year for managing the project, with no additional effort for development or support. About 2 MY of effort was being used to install hardware. Grant applications were flooding in from all committees and 1.5 MY of effort would be used in assessing these and discussing with users. A further 1.5 MY was being used up on user support. Consequently no effort was available for software development, assessment etc.
The SUSSG agreed to tell CCC that unless 15 MY of effort was available in 1983/84 and more effort in the current year, the project would be seriously retarded. If less than 10 MY per year was provided, the project was not viable.
SUSSG wanted to upgrade all PERQ systems to 1 Mbyte and believed additional recurrent should be found to do this as it would make software development, performance and ease of support much better. More funds were required from CCC.
DL requested a PERQ from SUSSG for a number of applications in protein crystallography, microdensitometer data analysis and scientific databases. It was felt that some of these activities should be supported directly by the Science Board.
The need to move the CSSR database from the DEC10 was a responsibility of CCC. It was agreed that DL should take responsibility for implementation of Chemical Databases and that they should supervise a contract to Owen Mills at Manchester to get the graphical side of CSSR working on the PERQ. This PERQ was provided by the Common Base Project not the Science Board.
By this time, the Computer Board had agreed to purchase a number of PERQs for university computer centres and to use QMC to support these. As a result, Jeremy Brandon of QMC was added to SUSSG to represent Computer Board interests.
The major points arising from the second meeting were:
The main points from the meeting were:
PERQ-DAP: CCC had decided that the Engineering Board Computing and Communications Sub-Committee should be responsible for the PERQ-DAP and not SUSSG. It presumably saw the PERQ-DAP as a computer science novel architecture. Consequently, there was no route for the Science Board to influence the way PERQ-DAP was handled. Presumably the Science Board representative on CCC was satisfied with this approach and informed the Biological Sciences Committee. RAL has no evidence that this happened.
SUSSG agreed to press Brian Oakley for an early decision on whether DoI and SERC would support the PERQ-DAP.
PERQ Support: the SUSSG were concerned about the lack of support for PERQs running POS out in the field. RAL had been reluctant to send out POS systems for this very reason as RAL neither had the manpower or expertise to support POS.
It was agreed to hold a user forum with ICL present to allow users to air any problems directly with ICL.
After the meeting, ICL agreed with SERC that SUSSG was the body that should receive confidential information from ICL and no other. ICL agreed to demonstrate both the PERQ-DAP and the landscape display to SUSSG at their next meeting to be held at Kidsgrove.
