Chapter 25 gave the history of the PERQ-DAP activities up to March 1983. ICL were keen to produce a batch of pre-production PERQ-DAPs as long as they had support from DoI and the user community. Otherwise, they would concentrate activities on the military version allowing the commercial version to move forward at the speed that their limited funding allowed.
DoI's internal bureaucracy made it difficult for them to provide support and SERC's Central Computing Committee were unwilling to find the money from a reducing budget as the four Boards withdrew funds from the Central Computing activities.
At the start of 1983, ICL had set up the nucleus of the software team for PERQ/DAP and the hardware team was already in place. The aim was to have pre-production systems available by April 1984 with June 1984 as the target for production systems. Whether these would be military or commercial or both would depend on the market.
A full presentation to SERC in March 1983 gave the specification of the system for the first time. After full assessment of what needed to be done, the pre-production date had slipped to June 1984 with production systems available in December 1984.
By the time the PERQ Business Centre at Kidsgrove had been established in the Autumn of 1983, PERQ-DAPs were beginning to take shape. ICL continued working on the project throughout 1983 targeting the system to the military applications early on as no support was provided by DoI or SERC.
