The SUSSG was finally wound up when the Common Base Programme was handed back to the Engineering Board in April 1985. During 1984 and 1985, the Steering Group met six times with major activities being the PERQ Progress, the SUS Assessment, ICL's future plans and the various negotiations concerning upgrades to the early PERQ systems to make their future viable both in terms of hardware and software. These have already been discussed in depth. The other activities are described below.
SUSSG made a detailed statement in March 1984 to the Computing Review Working Party looking at the future of computing support in SERC. It made it clear that the future of interactive systems was with single user systems. The multi user systems could perhaps become servers for particular functions on a distributed interactive computing facility connected by high speed local area networks.
It emphasised that a sensible level of funding was vitally important if a coherent policy was to be established within SERC and the Computer Board. The 5 man years of effort allocated in 1983/4 was totally inadequate.
It made a strong case that the level of funding should be 30 man years per year and a total budget of £1M per year.
The Working Party, which was dominated by members having an interest in large scale computing, was unsympathetic to the SUSSG's recommendations. Only the Engineering Board made a strong statement concerning single user systems, with the ASR and Nuclear Physics Boards concentrating on data analysis and the Science Board on vector processing.
The Working Party saw three possibilities for the support of single user systems in the future:
The Working Party saw a considerable growth in this area of computing in all Board areas and believed a return to central control might be sensible in the future.
The Working Party recommended that the third option should be taken and this was agreed by the Boards and Council. The Working Party believed that 0.25 times the capital value per year was a reasonable amount for other Boards to pay for support.
In the Science Board submission to the Working Party, single user systems were not mentioned in their list of priority areas. In relation to the Common Base Policy, the points made were that although recognising the advantages, such a policy should not be too rigid nor should it be tied down to particular hardware nor a single supplier. In a rapidly developing situation such as the present, any common base policy, to be successful, must be flexible enough to take advantage of developing possibilities. The standardisation of software is important and any decision on standardisation should be supported by a widest possible consultation with the user community.
SUSSG would have few problems disagreeing with any of these statements as it was the path that it had been following over the last two years, despite getting little feedback from the Boards as to their requirements.
The Report made no recommendation as to the level of funding for Single User System support except that the 0.25 × capital value implied a support level of between £O.75M and £lM per year. This is close to the 30 man years and recurrent budget of £lM in total proposed by SUSSG. Funding at anywhere near this level has never been provided in any year of the Common Base Project.
The Working Party report was accepted by CCC and support for the Common Base Programme was returned to the Engineering Board in April 1985.
The other Boards agreed to provide support for their systems at the rate recommended by the Working Party.
