The fastest general-purpose computer in the world has been installed at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory at Chilton. The ICL Atlas 10, to be used by about 2,000 research scientists, cost £2m and it is the most powerful general purpose uniprocessor in the country. It is exactly 20 years since Rutherford bought its first ICL computer - the Atlas 1 -- the biggest machine in the world at the time, which cost £3m. Its young relation, the Atlas 10, works 15 times as fast with 8 to 15 million operations per second, and has a storage capacity thousands of times bigger. It arrived in one lorry (Atlas 1 arrived in 19 lorries) and took three days to install in its own clean room. It has been paid for by the Science and Engineering Research Council.
Pictured toasting the new computer are (left to right) Dr Geoff Manning, Olaf von Bulow, Prof. F. R. A. Hopgood and Dr Jack Howlett.
