Control Data
So, back in the old days when they still made things in Gloucester...
[See, that's an interesting thing. Where I grew up, nobody actually made anything. There were no factories. Those were kept far away in pictures on Midlands Today from mythical places like Smethwick, Cradely Heath and Wolverhampton. They had a special man whose job it was to go and speak to a fellow in overalls standing next to a brazier outside some gates and interpret his language of 'differentials' and 'free collective bargaining'. It was very odd to peer out of the Land-rover windows at the grubbier parts of Gloucester or Stroud and see the same sort of sawtooth factory roofing that was on the telly from far away. In one sense, AA Gill is correct: Stow on the Wold is a terrible and self-satisfied sort of place. In the other sense, his notion that the Cotswolds north of Chipping Norton is a wasteland is clearly the excitable and impenetrable jabbering of the long-term institutionalised sans medication.]
... There was a factory at the far end of what used to be the Gloster Aircraft site that made the sort of airport crash-tenders I'd seen in the Ladybird book of Commercial Vehicles. Big red oblong Gerry Anderson things. And in that factory there was an OEMed LSI-11 system (probably Midlectron, given the state of the build) that did... Things.
It was at the far end of the drawing office, which had been slung in the eaves of the ex-hangar where they built the tenders. As if the draughtsmen were descended from nesting swallows. They obviously weren't, because there was a narrow and steep staircase up to the office and I've never seen swallows smoke Players tabs.
I'd been called out there because I was performing in the Field Circus and the DEC box had expired. It was quickly obvious that the filters in the CDC Phoenix (40Mb fixed, 40Mb removable IIRC. [Which I don't, it transpires: 15Mb removable, 60Mb fixed. Hurrah for the collective memory of The Internet.] A preposterous amount of storage for what was only a medium-sized factory) hadn't been changed since the fall of Saigon. There was also the matter of the curious brown tinge covering the rest of the equipment (a normally white TVI-950 terminal and 132-column Anadex printer).
I asked the chap showing me the kit if it was a smoking office.
"Nope. They banned smoking in the office a couple of years back. Caused a bit of a stink."
"So is there a smoking room or anything like that?"
"Nah. You've to go outside and stand at the edge of the runway, but most of the lads can't be doing with that and come in here..."
A mob of blokes crammed into the end cupobard where they kept The Computer, all puffing away furiously on Woodbines and Navy Cut on a damp Tuesday morning can do quite a bit of damage to a disk-drive. But not as much as...
... CDC Hawks (5Mb fixed, 5Mb removable) are pretty much a three-bloke lift. Two on the heavy end next to the voice-coil, one on the lighter end by the blower motor. Phoenixes are a lot heavier. It was going to have to go back to the workshop where we'd a vaguely cleaner environment to pull it to bits and replace all the r/w heads. However, no-one could see how to get the thing down to ground level. Then someone suggested using one of the forklifts. There was a door in one side of the office that opened out into space. There had presumably been a verandah or gantry of some kind. What was left was a couple of sections of I-beam and a bloody long drop.
The stacker with the longest lift in the place hummed into position. At full extent, the forks were just on the level of the I-beam. The foreman edged out onto the beam and put one foot on one of the forks. It set to waving back and forth by about a yard. He came back in again, looking somewhat discomfited.
In the end, we edged the thing down the stairs, a shuffling mob of about eight chaps grunting and swearing and trying not to think about what would happen if anyone let go.
[See, that's an interesting thing. Where I grew up, nobody actually made anything. There were no factories. Those were kept far away in pictures on Midlands Today from mythical places like Smethwick, Cradely Heath and Wolverhampton. They had a special man whose job it was to go and speak to a fellow in overalls standing next to a brazier outside some gates and interpret his language of 'differentials' and 'free collective bargaining'. It was very odd to peer out of the Land-rover windows at the grubbier parts of Gloucester or Stroud and see the same sort of sawtooth factory roofing that was on the telly from far away. In one sense, AA Gill is correct: Stow on the Wold is a terrible and self-satisfied sort of place. In the other sense, his notion that the Cotswolds north of Chipping Norton is a wasteland is clearly the excitable and impenetrable jabbering of the long-term institutionalised sans medication.]
... There was a factory at the far end of what used to be the Gloster Aircraft site that made the sort of airport crash-tenders I'd seen in the Ladybird book of Commercial Vehicles. Big red oblong Gerry Anderson things. And in that factory there was an OEMed LSI-11 system (probably Midlectron, given the state of the build) that did... Things.
It was at the far end of the drawing office, which had been slung in the eaves of the ex-hangar where they built the tenders. As if the draughtsmen were descended from nesting swallows. They obviously weren't, because there was a narrow and steep staircase up to the office and I've never seen swallows smoke Players tabs.
I'd been called out there because I was performing in the Field Circus and the DEC box had expired. It was quickly obvious that the filters in the CDC Phoenix (40Mb fixed, 40Mb removable IIRC. [Which I don't, it transpires: 15Mb removable, 60Mb fixed. Hurrah for the collective memory of The Internet.] A preposterous amount of storage for what was only a medium-sized factory) hadn't been changed since the fall of Saigon. There was also the matter of the curious brown tinge covering the rest of the equipment (a normally white TVI-950 terminal and 132-column Anadex printer).
I asked the chap showing me the kit if it was a smoking office.
"Nope. They banned smoking in the office a couple of years back. Caused a bit of a stink."
"So is there a smoking room or anything like that?"
"Nah. You've to go outside and stand at the edge of the runway, but most of the lads can't be doing with that and come in here..."
A mob of blokes crammed into the end cupobard where they kept The Computer, all puffing away furiously on Woodbines and Navy Cut on a damp Tuesday morning can do quite a bit of damage to a disk-drive. But not as much as...
... CDC Hawks (5Mb fixed, 5Mb removable) are pretty much a three-bloke lift. Two on the heavy end next to the voice-coil, one on the lighter end by the blower motor. Phoenixes are a lot heavier. It was going to have to go back to the workshop where we'd a vaguely cleaner environment to pull it to bits and replace all the r/w heads. However, no-one could see how to get the thing down to ground level. Then someone suggested using one of the forklifts. There was a door in one side of the office that opened out into space. There had presumably been a verandah or gantry of some kind. What was left was a couple of sections of I-beam and a bloody long drop.
The stacker with the longest lift in the place hummed into position. At full extent, the forks were just on the level of the I-beam. The foreman edged out onto the beam and put one foot on one of the forks. It set to waving back and forth by about a yard. He came back in again, looking somewhat discomfited.
In the end, we edged the thing down the stairs, a shuffling mob of about eight chaps grunting and swearing and trying not to think about what would happen if anyone let go.