Story
(Hardware)
Designer
Final Spec
Concepts
Old Comp
Software
People
Media
Support
Future
Links-
|
The ICT 1301 Resurrection Project.
The Engineer and Programmer day, George Brown and Paul Mines.
*** August Special Open Day ***
Over Fourty years after they worked on 1301's
both George Brown and Paul Maines visited for the day.
George Brown spotted the project when he saw a feature on BBC News/Southeast.
In his own words "It was like being reborn the 1301 was the first computer I worked on. I started with IT in 1962 with the prospect of being a Field Engineer at FEHQ in Luton. I had my first course at Stevenage in that terrible winter of 62/63 which I think was 17 weeks. "
Initially I was involved with installing around UK and Europe ( It took 3/4 weeks then
with up to 4 men ). One of the common ailments among the installers was wrappers elbow
which had to balanced out every evening by holding your pint in the other hand! Once a
few machines had been installed quite a lot of trouble shooting became the order of the day. Then came the modifications. If I remember rightly the University originally had a 1300 and I was there to upgrade it to a 1301 ( a terribly difficult job of just exchanging the card reader and printer pulleys to speed them up!). I also did a number of card reader 'cut corner mods' which were required to enable 'Bull' 60 degree cut corners. I also briefly got involved with the 1302 and it's thin film store.
I had a fairly hectic 4 years until 1966 when, on a fault solving visit to DVD Schaffhausen in Switzerland, I was offered a two year contract as resident Technician. To cut a long story short I did take the job which was like dying after so many active years. Out of sheer boredom I made the mistake of doing routine maintenance on the punch. After cleaning the contacts, as it says in the manual, it took me two hours to get it working again!
It was not long before George started to explain his time in Schaffhausen.
Paul Maines remembers well working on the Rubery Owen 1301 in 1965 using TAS & MPL2,
his first programming language and some machine code for
12 zone 12 numeric to 6 zone 6 numeric conversion.
Paul very intent as Roger fires up the Demo Program.
Paul Maines Kindly donated a working oscilloscope and a contribution to Flossie's fund.
You are welcome back any time Paul.
|