8 FANTASTIC FACTS ABOUT COMPUTING AT QUEEN MARY

20 November 2013

• The first computer was installed in Queen Mary in 1968. To see the installation watch a film recorded to mark the occasion.
• Queen Mary staff wrote software for the computer, as described in this article in the Computer Conservation Society Newsletter.
• Queen Mary was a real leader in computer systems research at the time, and later hosted the first UK version of UNIX. More information is available on the department website.
• Queen Mary implemented software for the ICL 1900 'exec' to share discs between multi-processors with lockouts to prevent inconsistencies caused by unsynchronized updates and this (like Maximop) became a standard part of ICLs OS offering.
• Queen Mary hosted a 'Distributed Array Processor' service for UK universities using the ICL mainframe (2900 series at the time) which also grew into a national support centre for highly-parallel computing.
• Queen Mary was involved in early computer-aided design work, making it a significant facility for the multi-access service.
• Queen Mary implemented our own 'concentrator' devices using very early microcomputers to make access to the time-sharing service more economic by sharing communications lines.
• From 1976 some College staff reportedly started to receive and send ARPANET messages about the NASA-Dutch-UK Infrared Astronomy Satellite (IRAS), through the Queen Mary College mainframe. The US ARPANET network was the precursor of email.  These weren't the first emails received in the UK but they are likely to be among the earliest.