The scientific computers in use by UK Universities in 1965 were:
The IBM 7090 at Imperial College was larger than all the earlier computers put together.
The eight KDF9s recommended by the Flowers Report were each less powerful than the IBM 7090 but combined probably were five times its power.
Most university machines were not operated on a 24/7 basis so the Chilton Atlas when fully operational exceeded the power of all the existing university computers in 1965 apart from the other Atlas computers.
The main computers available to university researchers by 1965 were:
AEA (Atomic Energy Authority) and NIRNS in addition to their use of the Chilton Atlas had or were getting:
In consequence, the usage of the Chilton Atlas by Harwell and RHEL had declined significantly by the time the machine was working 7 days a week. By then the Chilton Atlas was primarily supporting university researchers and other government departments.
Many universities had requests for computing time that they could not meet and saw the free computing time at the Chilton Atlas as a welcome relief. The universities with the larger KDF9 and Atlas computers had the opposite situation. Their best users would be encouraged to seek the larger amounts of computation available at Chilton with possibly less competition. The solution was that potential users had to get permission to approach the Atlas Computer Laboratory from the local computer centre. This was advantageous to both organisations. The Atlas Computer Laboratory would tend to get groups of large users in a specific discipline while the local university computer centre would have a manageable set plus the advantage of knowing what its potential user base might be in the future. This was particularly important to the universities with very little computer power as they could use their users of the Atlas Computer Laboratory as evidence of their local future demands.
