Around 1963 Ferranti were looking for a system below the speed of Orion and Atlas to replace Pegasus, Mercury and Sirius. Their Canadian subsidiary, Ferranti Packard had recently visited the UK, and based on their knowledge of the Ferranti they designed the FP6000. The first FP6000 was installed and running at the US Federal Reserve Bank in New York in March 1963.
A joint ICT/Ferranti team visited Toronto in March 1963. The interest was in both the machine architecture and how they had produced it in such a short timescale. The party reported back that it would be quicker to build the FP6000 than design an alternative. A later visit by Arthur Humphreys of ICT and colleagues were equally impressed and saw it as a definite competitor to the RCS systems (an IBM copy) that was being looked at by ICT.
About this time, it was beginning to be realised that producing a range of incompatible systems was both labour intensive and expensive. Having a system that could cover a range of different sizes and speeds would have distinct advantages. IBM announced the System/360 series and others need to compete. The only way to do that in the short term was to base a series on hardware that was already in production. ICT selected the FP6000 as the basis of their range and this speeded up the ICT/Ferranti merger.
The 1900 Series was announced in September 1964, only six months after IBM launched System/360 and some 1900 models were delivered earlier than their IBM equivalents. The FP6000 was based on logic cards developed in Ferranti Wythenshawe for Orion 2. Some major changes had to be made to the architecture to turn it into a range. The order code had to be altered to allow the memory size to be greater than 128K 6-bit characters.
Atlas was demonstrating the advantages of a rich operating system and this resulted in the development of GEORGE III. The FP6000 became the ICT 1904 and with floating point as the 1905. More powerful machines - the 1906/1907 - were planned and included in the initial announcement. Faster machines pushed the technology and the architecture. Smaller machines needed to be made cheaper. Charlie Portman of ICT was instrumental in showing that cost effective smaller systems could be built and eventually it was possible to go down to the 1901.
Long timescales in IBM's delivery of System/360 and the cheaper cost of ICT's 6-bit systems gave ICT a price advantage that allowed them to sell well in Europe and outside the USA. Long-term, 6-bit characters and 48-bit words became a distinct disadvantage and there was always going to be a need to introduce a new range in the not too distant future. The 2900 series was finally launched in 1974.
For information on the ICL 1900 Series see: http://www.icl1900.co.uk/
OVER 130 George 3 alumni were rounded up at ICL's Beaumont training centre last Friday: April 27, by that still virile organisation, the George 3 Beer Committee.
The occasion was the tenth anniversary of the announcement of George 3 on April Fools Day 1969 and, as one wag commented, being only 26 days late after ten years was not bad going.
That reference to lateness struck a nightmarish chord among those who had been involved in the early releases of George 3 when changes and delays were happening so rapidly that the user notices to update newly published manuals were often larger than the manuals themselves.
Yet when George 3 began to reach maturity at the age of about Mark 5 and the teething problems receded into the warmth of childhood memories, the operating system began to achieve first respect and then love among its users.
That love has become embarrassing for ICL because, as reflected by the comments of the chairman of the ICL Computer Users Association at last month's user convention, users are asking why the 2900 operating systems have not yet lived up to the standards set by George.
This favourable user response to George is the true vindication of the work which grew in the mid-60s from the nucleus design team of Jeff Strauss, Dan Oestreicher, Brian Moore and Mick Bailey to encompass around 500 development staff and untold person hours of work. Many users would now proudly wear the vintage badge produced some years ago by ICL sales promotion, which stated GEORGE 3 FOR ME.
Mingling among the merry at Beaumont, Strauss recalled how George was named. Seven design options were being considered, identified by the letters A to G. The seventh option was chosen and the G turned to George and was then linked to the manager of the division responsible for its development, George Felton. Finally came the expansion of the name to GEneral ORGanisational Environment so that an answer could be given to the question "What does George mean?"
The loyalty to George 3 by its former staff was indicated by the large turn-out at Beaumont. Beer Committee chairman Roy Walker said he had managed to draw up a list of over 300 staff who had been on George 3 development.
