In 1972 a case was made to purchase a CDC STAR-100 system front-ended by a STAR-1B with the STAR-1B to be delivered in 1973 and the STAR-100 in 1974. This was a massive system with 4 Mbytes of main memory with two 64-Mbyte paging drums giving a virtual memory of over 128 Mbytes.
Although its basic speed was about the same as a CDC 7600, simulations at the Laboratory showed that, for example, on quantum chemistry applications, the vector processing capability would enhance the performance to about 100 Atlas power.
This was a major advance in computer architecture. Achieving vector processing from a machine with virtual memory was a major challenge. It was possible that a paging interrupt would occur in the middle of the execution of a vector command.
At a cost of £4M, it would be necessary to convince the Science Board of the Science research Council that a machine that size was necessary.
London University adds a CDC7600 to their CDC 6400/6600 providing an academic service. They become the largest academic service in the UK dwarfing the Atlas Computer Laboratory service.
Edinburgh replaces their IBM 360/50 by an IBM 370/155
Late in the year, the Atlas Laboratory finally gets an upgrade to their facility but it is almost irrelevant in terms of capacity to the academic community. the 20%#37; share of the Rutherford Laboratory's 360/195 gives more processing capacity.
