Ferranti Atlas: Britain's first supercomputer

[@chridmeister]

My Dad worked for Ferranti in Manchester in the 60's, I remember him bringing home spare circuit boards which we would cannibalise to make our own projects. This video is incredibly precious to me as it shows what he was working on at the time. Thanks very much for posting this.

[@RonShiel]

I joined computer division of Ferranti in 1962 as as student apprentice. In 1965 went to work on the Atlas at Manchester Uni in Dover Street as a junior field engineer. The machine was getting reliable by then and we engineers bought lilo beds for the night shift. Also our room overlooked the ladies changing room of a Uni theatre across the road!! The machine would time share (one at a time, NOT multitasking) 64 programs each up to 500,000 instructions. Results were printed on fast line printers

[@Hotelechomike]

My father was one of the users of the Manchester Atlas (for Chemistry research) and as a school kid I was occasionally taken into the Atlas room at weekends without realising the significance of the whole thing. Subsequently I studied Computer Science at Manchester with lectures from Tom, Dai, Simon & colleagues. When the Manchester Atlas was decommisioned I saw how some large components were thrown over the parapet of the flat roof of the electrical engineering building into a skip below (I was watching from the 7th floor of the Chemistry building).

[@misiddiai]

I would love to see a comparison between old supercomputers and modern desktop pc's

[@joshuagoodsell5952]

misiddiai that’s what I was looking for lol

[@KaotiqInOz]

Well there is software to run emulation of old machines on modern ones, SIMH (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIMH) is one example, Hercules (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_(emulator)) is another, you can run a '70s or '80s mini, mainframe or super much faster than the original on something like a raspberry pi, oh and the power bills are significantly lower ;)

[@toresbe]

This is such a fantastic video series! Would it be possible to upload the full original film sequences as well?

[@gumps77]

That was just brilliant. Hats off to them.

[@computingheritage]

I asked the producers and they told me the first 1 min 10 secs is a track called "Neutrinos" that they sourced from the Audio Network site

[@raysrcsandtech]

Great video, John's statement at 5:52 made me smile

[@RonShiel]

( The other Atlas at Aldermaston had two more tape decks than us (we had 16) and complained at the last of decimal places for their hydrogen bomb calculations!!! ) We had the 1st ever on line processing data link to Jodrell Bank radio telescope in 1965. It was a magic machine but I was aged 20 and fully trained.

[@Mr.1.i]

ferranti was a popular choice for ula chips in many home computers in the 70s and 80s

[@omikl]

Seeing this film and being an ex-inmate of MAN05 promts this only slightly related question: What was that old Ferranti machine that used to be on display in the ground floor lobby of the West Gorton Tower Block in the late 80's?

[@ghakharraja]

GREAT VIDEO, BRITISH legacy!

[@adeferranti4610]

From that,to what we have today,,what will we have in 50 years time

[@alanwild72]

I worked for ICT then ICSL and programmed in ABL on Atlas. Atlas os one of the greatest inventions from Britain.

[@RonShiel]

I was asked to train a 28yr old married man as an operator. After a month he he asked me to check the tax on his pay slip. He was earning TWICE what I was and I was training him. Apparently the company paid on age scale to age 28 and married men were paid more the single men. I resigned from Ferranti (then ICT or ICL Ltd)

[@yehancha]

They did a great job.

[@roopdaug]

Anyone know where I could source the original video during the first 15 seconds?

[@lynetter]

It was a long while ago but am pretty sure that came from the Science Museum's archives (although it may also have been at the National Archive for Computing History in Manchester - I vaguely recall it was a little hard to track down). It was extracted from an 8 minute film made to be used in connection with the December 1962 Atlas inaugural ceremonies in Manchester. I've asked the producer if they can remember for sure - if they can I'll post again but otherwise hopefully this gives you enough of a lead!

[@joerogers4227]

A computer that I worked on used a Magnostrictive delay line memories made by Ferranti.

[@saf271828]

If memory serves me correctly, this is also the first computer to make use of capabilities to enforce security too. Too bad *that* concept didn't spread like wildfire. :(

[@RetroGamerVX]

Great documentary about a system I've never heard of. I was wondering if it would be possible to put this onto my channel some day with an intro from me, obviously, crediting yourself and your channel? :o)

[@DoomOfConviction]

As a electrician watching the cable management I just want to cry out in pain… seeking a error must be a horror indeed!

[@lauraalderman719]

Hi, laura from STV News here - would we be able to use 5-10 seconds of this video in a news report for tomorrow with a credit caption to you? Many thanks

[@corkkyle]

Fantastic.

[@chridmeister]

ESD was not a thing at that time because MOS technology did not exist yet.

[@akrita81]

At 3:35.It was also the first laptop (comes on a red or any other color truck you want)

[@bulgingbattery2050]

This was between vacuum tube technology and integrated circuits. I believe it used diode transistors.

[@RonShiel]

There were no vacuum circuits on the atlas. It was the first fully transistorised computer.

[@michaelshore2300]

A General purpose computer Used diodes AND transistors All based on The Manchester Baby, started when the first 'hearing aid' transistor became available. Contemporary with Ferranti Argus series Of process control computers 1961 At the same time the first integrated circuits were being produced A complete Flipflop or op Amp in a TO5 can

[@topzozzle6319]

So now I know that I wash my clothes in a supercomputer

[@VictorGarcia-si8wy]

that cabling at 0:33. That's gonna give me nightmares.

[@raymondleggs5508]

What is ESD and MOS?

[@petercrowther198]

ESD: Electrostatic Discharge. Static electricity zaps. MOS: Metal-Oxide Semiconductor. A structure that you can use to make transistors.

[@Mark_Ocain]

This was kind of parallelling IBMs devolpment in some respects and at least a decade ahead in others. Pity they didnt haver the factory resources and backing that IBM had. IBM had clean rooms and Ferranti had to settle for a dirty old warehouse for assembly.

[@amine0003]

0:12

[@markhodgson2348]

British and the best

[@stefbcrich]

Apple's gonna sue them too now

[@johncrowther8487]

The greasy filth was only at one end of the Fixed Store, out of sight.

[@WombatVC]

Looking at the way the people handled the PCBs and components, the concept of ESD protection did not exist.

[@BillyAlvarenga]

But Can it run Crysis?

[@TheBespectacledN00b]

Billy Alvarenga Maybe Space War.

[@keithammleter3824]

Hardly a supercomputer in the modern sense. The English love to tell us how they have the most advanced technology, even when (as almost always) they don't. Let's look at some performance statistics, comparing the Atlas with a contempory machine:- Atlas: Introduced 1962, 48 bit words, 1.6 microsec instruction time, 16kByte working RAM. IBM 7030: Introduced 1961, 64 bit words, 1.5 microsec instruction time, 256kByte working RAM. That makes the IBM at least about 4-10 times faster in use, depending on the applications run. The IBM reliability would have been far beyond the Atlas.

[@alphalunamare]

I think your information is incorrect. It's absolute bollux actually except for the instruction time but then it all depends on what your instructions can do doesn't it? BTW: If you listen. there were Welsh voices not just English, so your xenophobia is well miss placed..

[@keithammleter3824]

@@alphalunamare : Different instruction sets rarely make much difference in practice, although one can always write a program to highlight something a particular instruction set can do well. The IBM having 16 x 1.33 times as much working RAM would give a performance advantage in practice far outweighing any instruction set advantage. The designers of early British computers such as Altas had a penchant for making stack-based instruction sets. Stack based working has certain theoretical advantages but is a prick to program, and in practice the theoretical benefit is lost. I have checked the data I gave - word length, RAM size, date of introduction - all are correct. There are several different accents spoken in the film. None of them mean that this is not an English/British film. If you are trying to say the people of Wales are different to the people to the east - that is like saying Georgians or Californians are not people of the USA, though their accents are. quite different. It is a fact that the English love to tell us they invented all sorts of stuff that they didn't, or perfected something first. Examples:- Magnetron used in wartime airborne radar, supposedly invented by Randal & Boot. Actually it was invented by a Japanese university professor well before the War. Theye never mention that radar needs two essential things - something to emit the pulses (that's where the magnetron comes in) and something to receive and detect the reflected pulses coming back. In wartime airborne and marine radar, that was the point contact diode, invented in the USA. Television; I've seen countless books, TV programmes, etc from England that claim TV was invented in England y J L Baird. Actually Baird was a con artist /snake oil salesman who didn't know how to make TV work, not even remotely. Funny enough, they all say he used a Nipkow disk to scan the picture. This was invented by P G Nipkow in Germany decades before. It never seems to occur to English journalists to ask why is it called a Nipkow disk, and not a Baird disk.

[@alphalunamare]

@@keithammleter3824 I could be wrong, it might be 0110 21 00 28 meaning V21 = VN0 but that was on a FM1600E come to think of it. Manual/ SS/Normal etc! got it?

[@alphalunamare]

@@keithammleter3824 As for Georgians and Californians ... Jeff Foxworthy and Dwight Yoakham ... both most excellent.

[@toresbe]

This is such a fantastic video series! Would it be possible to upload the full original film sequences as well?

[@adeferranti4610]

From that,to what we have today,,what will we have in 50 years time