PERQ Demonstration Room

The first PERQ arrived at RAL from Three Rivers on the 21 January 1981. Two other machines arrived soon after. Both Logica and ICL had ordered systems from Three Rivers for assessment. RAL purchased these from them so that there was a pool of systems in one place. At the time Logica were interested in doing developments associated with the PERQ and possibly maintaining PERQs in the UK. RAL was still trying to convince ICL to enter into an agreement with Three Rivers.

It was anticipated that visitors to RAL would be interested in seeing the first commercial single user workstation. In consequence, a room was redecorated at RAL to show off how PERQs might fit into an office environment. Two of the three systems were installed in the demo room and spent most of 1981 being shown off to visitors.

A few things to notice are;

• Each of the three systems had different characteristics. One had a 50 cycle supply, another 60 cycles. They were very early machines from Three Rivers so were at different levels of development. In consequence, coloured stickers were placed on each machine so that the right monitor and peripherals were used with the correct machine. These can be seen on Ian Benest's machine near the floppy drive.
• The rasterop speed on the PERQ was impressive. Windows could be moved smoothly under the control of the mouse. One early demonstration was to have four ICL directors in the four quarters of the A4 screen and either have them changing randomly or under the control of the user. A print-out from the screen is visible on the plotter to the right of Carol Barnes.
• The Display Board behind Ian Benest was hooked on the wall. A set of Display Boards were constructed and the most appropriate one used for each presentation.
• The Computer Graphics books on the shelf include the Methodology of Interaction which is the Proceedings of the IFIP Workshop in France in May 1979 where the US participants from Carnegie Mellon University and Toronto University were enthusing over this company, Three Rivers, that was producing a commercial equivalent of the Xerox PARC Alto.