The ICT 1301 Resurrection Project.
Events

Past Events

*** The Public Open Day.***

*** July 11th 2010 ***

Rita ready to power flossie up !

2010 Open Day Summary !

The day started with me joining a long queue of traffic flowing a classic driving to the show, so I sat back and relaxed following an Austin Sprite and enjoying the sunshine. We finally arrived at the farm just after 08:00 am and the first thing was to see if flossie was going to work at all today ? We have had problems prior to the open day and we knew it was going to be touch and go if the new Demo Program would work.

The demo program was loaded from the drum and ran first time which impressed even me.

Whilst the machine ran in the background, it was the usual panic to set up the small Gazebo for the visitors and the signs pointing to the event. The first visitors started poking thier heads around the door at about 09:03, a bit earlier than usual and we were 'OFF' as the saying goes !

Help this year was from Stuart Fyfe ( as usual ) who had driven a very long way to be with us today and it was nice to see him with Flossie again, for Stuart was an original member of the Galdor group who owned flossie so many years ago. Stuart also acts as our Contact manager and holds the email list. These 'Open Days' are a rolling cycle of running the story, then the demo and then just stopping and talking to the visitors. In between cycles in was great to talk to our visitors on the day who this year featured , Geoge Brown, Paul Mines, John Clarke, and it was very nice too see Hamish arrive, it did not take long before Hamish got caught up the the event and started answering visitors questions, and I think I caught a small gleam in his eye as he recounted some of the history to visitors.

It would be remiss of me not to mention Pete Chilvers who must have driven a long way on the day to give us a vist. Nice to see you Pete, and we will find out where that Logic Rack at Bletchly actually fits in flossie. I will confirm facts after the next visit.

Other surprise visitors included John Rose's Wife, so It was regards to John who I have not see since the Central London days at Bank of England. How do you fancy fixing some decks for us John?

We estimate we demonstrated flossie to over 300 visitors. ( this estimate is based on the number of handouts passed to visitors, , and further evidence from a time lapse recording camera )The day was quite warm with both direct sunlight and patches of cloud, so we had to be carefull not to let flossie get too hot.

However the lady did us pround and ran the demo delivering CLEAR WRITE paper tapes, for each small piece of TTY prepared tape we fed into her. So we are happy that she lasted all of the day before we powered her down at the end of the day knowing that the years of work had been worthwhile.

I mostly enjoyed handing out short pieces of Paper Tape to all the little ones, these had ICT1301 punched in Clearwrite so it was readable, freshly punched for them before the day.
However talking to those who recognised the Mainframe period is always fun.


A big THANK YOU goes out to all our helpers on the day! including the Marathon driving by Stuart and Olwen and of course the Owner Roger.