International Computers Limited and the Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC) have signed an agreement to collaborate on the development of software and future enhancements for the PERQ personal scientific workstation which ICL is marketing and will manufacture in the United Kingdom under licence from the Three Rivers Computer Corporation of America.
SERC has also agreed to purchase PERQ workstations from ICL for use by its own scientists and by other research workers in Universities and elsewhere who are carrying out projects funded by SERC and other Research Councils. The exact number to be ordered will depend on the success of the collaborative project but a quantity in excess of 200 over the next two years is not unrealistic.
As a first step, SERC has already placed orders with ICL for 20 PERQ workstations, valued at £500,000, and has indicated that orders for a further 20 will be placed shortly for delivery within the next three months.
Commenting on the agreement at a press conference at the Rutherford Laboratory today, Ninian Eadie, Director of ICL's Product Marketing Division said, This collaborative agreement with SERC gives a tremendous boost to our already ambitious plans for marketing the PERQ. It will enable a host of existing applications packages to be run on PERQ and thus take us quickly into new market areas covering the whole spectrum of research, engineering and industrial design .
We will commence manufacture of the PERQ workstation in our Letchworth factory early next year and the rate of production will reach 2000 units per annum in 1983, he said.
A joint ICL/SERC software development team is now being set up and has already commenced work at Rutherford Laboratory. The initial work being undertaken is the implementation of the UNIX operating system on the PERQ workstation. This is now scheduled for completion early in 1982 and will allow the use on PERQ of existing FORTRAN, BASIC and LISP compilers, and a wide range of utilities and applications software currently running under UNIX on other manufacturers' hardware.
Further work to be undertaken by the joint development team includes the provision of advanced networking capabilities for the PERQ system, and its connection to high speed local area networks such as the Cambridge Ring.
A third area of collaboration between ICL and SERC covers the specification of future models of PERQ. Two new models are currently envisaged - a higher performance, higher speed version with colour graphics and a low-cost unit which, by 1985, could sell for about £5,000.
The joint ICL/SERC development project is one of a number of areas of software development currently open to ICL which will enable the Company to extend its PERQ marketing operations into the engineering productivity market, and to all public and private organisations which employ engineers and scientists in a design capacity. Other software development is being undertaken jointly with Three Rivers Computer Corporation and internally within ICL. ICL is also actively seeking agreement with systems houses, software houses, OEM suppliers and dealers in computer products and many of these will be invited to develop suitable software for use with the PERQ workstation, or modify existing software developed for other systems.
The ICL PERQ system is the first of a new breed of very powerful, single-user computers with an integral, top-quality graphics display. It provides the scientist and engineering user with an exclusive, powerful and easy to use computer which is completely under his own control and which can be linked into local area networks.
PERQ, which is priced at around £25,000, has a 64 bit word length with 32 bit virtual addressing. The processor has a speed of up to 1 million Q codes per second which is the equivalent power of a medium-sized mainframe. It has 256 Kbytes to 1 Mbytes of memory, an A4 bit-mapped graphical display, a graphics tablet, a 24 Mbytes Winchester rigid disc and a 1 Mbytes floppy disc. An IEEE 488 General Purpose Interface Bus enables peripherals and other laboratory equipment to be connected to it.
ICL is currently showing PERQ for the first time in public at the SICOB Exhibition in Paris. The first occasion when the new ICL PERQ workstation will be on general view in the UK is at the International Business Show in Birmingham, commencing on October 20.
FROM:
K G Howe
Press Office
ICL House
Putney, London SW15
Tel: 01 788 7272 ext. 2276
