The establishment of the Memorandum of Agreement between SERC and ICL to jointly develop a Common Base of software for the UK academic community and for ICL to market and manufacture PERQs in the UK is not an easy task to achieve within the SERC structure.
The SERC structure in 1979 was approximately:
Mainframe computing at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and Daresbury Laboratory was the responsibility of the Computer Facilities Committee. The Interactive Computing Facility Committee of the Engineering Board was responsible for the interactive multi user minis (mostly PRIME and GEC systems but also two DEC10s) that were situated in university engineering departments.
The DCS, STI and ICFC were interested in the move to single user systems.
A Working Party was set up in set up in 1980 by Council that noted the move away from mainframe computing and its proposal was accepted by Council that a Central Computing Committee (CCC) should be set up to oversee all computing facilities within SERC.
So for the crucial period as far as the PERQ Project and Common Base Programme was concerned the structure changed to:
By 1984 it became clear that this was not working and a second Working Party in 1984 made recommendations that were accepted that the responsibilities for ICFC and SUSSG should be returned to the Engineering Board. The crucial period between 1980 and 1984, which is the main life of the PERQ Project, the Engineering Board was not responsible for the computing facilities that it was mainly interested in.
This section contains some of the main papers that went to the Engineering Board initially and later Council that established the PERQ project.
