SUSSG met four times in 1983, in April, July, October and December. The April meeting was held at ICL in Kidsgrove which had just been opened. Much of the year was concerned with topics discussed under other sections:
In addition, three major topics were Finance, User Reactions and the relationship to the Computer Board.
The guidelines given to SUSSG by the Central Computing Committee for the year 1984/5 were that support should continue at the level of 5 man years of effort with a recurrent budget to provide maintenance for the systems owned by SUSSG and little else.
It was clearly totally inadequate and a minimum of 14 man years of effort was needed to provide reasonable support for the large number of PERQ systems that would be out in the user community by April 1985 (over 200). If the level of support could be increased from 5 to 10 man years, it would cover the current support services but allow no effort for further software developments.
SUSSG agreed that it would be impossible to continue the Common Base programme at the level of 5 man years.
It was agreed that unless the Central Computing Committee provided a minimum of 10 man years of effort, it would be better to close the programme down. Even at 14 man years, the ability to support a second system in the Common Base was extremely doubtful.
The need for a pool of PERQ systems was also beginning to arise in 1983. As a result, SUSSG decided to propose to CCC that a pool of PERQs be established in order that systems could be given to grant holders at the announcement of the grant rather than waiting several months for the system to be ordered. SUSSG put this proposal to CCC in December and it was agreed to establish such a pool.
SUSSG were concerned at the poor image that the programme had during the year due to late delivery of software and poor performance. Regular discussions were had concerning this and two user meetings were held in addition to the European PERQ User Group.
Particularly, the small number of Science Board users were very vocal. At its meeting in December 1983, the Science Board representatives indicated that the Board was reluctant to continue supporting the programme even at its modest share of the cost mainly because of late delivery of software. SUSSG felt that the criticisms may not be the consensus of Science Board but the views of a few dominant ones. It did not believe that the majority of users were as dissatisfied as was being made out. As a result it decided to have a ballot of all Science Board users to get their independent views of the state of the programme. It was agreed that this should be done by the Science Board representative, Dr Elder.
SUSSG were particularly concerned that a joint support arrangement should be concluded with the Computer Board if possible. It would stop duplication of work and provide similar support to the large number of Computer Board systems placed in university computer centres. As these had been made available on the basis of giving the local centre expertise in single user systems so that they could provide local support it was clearly an advantage to all if this was successful.
This was achieved in 1983 as described in Section 39.4.
