Seminar
ICT/ICL 1900
Keeping the 1900 competitive (Virgilio Pasquali)
I will
give a quick run-through of the selection and planning of the initial 1900
range, its competitive positions both at the start and at the end of its 10
years life in the market as the ICT and ICL main range and outline some of the
factors that contributed to its success.
I will
look at it from a Product Planning viewpoint, as I was involved with planning
the 1900 during its first , and formative, six years.
I will
start at the beginning, in 1962 in Ferranti. I was just finishing the
development of Orion in West Gorton and getting ready to take the first system
to Turitz in Gottemberg, to complete the development on site as it was the
custom at the time.
With Atlas
and Orion developments nearing completion, Hugh Devonald in Ferranti Bracknell
was assembling a small team to start thinking about the design of future
systems, and I was persuaded by Arthur Jackson to join that team (If I remember
correctly, Derek Eldridge and Glyn Emory were the other members). I readily
agreed to it, though it was taking me away from the exiting, creative and proud
West Gorton environment.
When I
joined the team in
Before a
lot of work was done, ICT took over Ferranti, and, with the cancellation of the
RCA Poplar, it was provisionally decided to adopt the 1900 as the basis for a
range for the whole of ICT.
(some technical characteristics, and how the
FP6000 was changed to become the 1900- Addressing range and ICT standard
interface. Remunish about Orion and the Bible)
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Having
been involved at the beginning, I can say with some certainty that the initial
manifestation of the 1900 did not suffer
from the long and careful planning of the IBM 360. We did it in a hell of a
rush! The IBM 360 announcement had given us market space that we exploited by
acting quickly.
Some six
months after the IBM announcement we were able to announce a range of seven
1900 system models , programming aids and 18 peripherals.(Insert 1900
Announcement Chart). And we followed it with the announcement of a smaller
system, the 1901, in 1965.
The
decision to go for the 1900 range left ICT facing a considerable challenge.
ICT had to
develop all its 1900 systems "in house". The external procurement
route was no longer available.
ICT was at
that time the number one supplier in the
But, as we
used to say proudly in those days, "IBM R&D spend is greater than ICT
total revenue."
ICT had
boosted its computer development skills by the acquisition of the EMI computer
team and the Ferranti Computer Department. It now had skilled development
groups in West Gorton and
It is
likely that, if we had applied today's management and risk assessment
techniques to the competitive challenge we were facing then, we would probably
have concluded that what we were trying to do was not possible!
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From the
performance point of view, the position
in '66, after the two ranges had settled down, was that the 1900 range was
competing well with the middle and lower part of the IBM 360, and, once the
1901 was announced in 1965, it was reaching below the level that the IBM 360,
with its heavier architecture, was able
to reach.
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But we had
some problems at the top. The 1900 range, given parity of technology, could not
compete with the top members of the IBM range in high commercial performance
single systems. We wanted to be in this area of the market with its prestigious
customers and its high profitability and this widely perceived shortfall
provided impetus towards multiprocessor systems and eventually provided some of
the drive towards a
Looking
back, I never cease to be surprised that our engineers and programmers
maintained, and improved, the competitive position of 1900 processor range
vis-à-vis IBM, despite the massive difference in development resources between
us and IBM.
Immediately
after the announcement ICT set about to expand the Range, testing the limits of
the Architecture both upwards and downwards.
As I have
already mentioned, immediately after 1964 announcement we started planning the
1901. At the time conventional wisdom was that you had to have good character
handling in that type of machine, and 1900 did not have any in the order code.
We could not introduce character handling instructions without breaking the "upward
compatibility rule". So we went for a straight 1900 machine and it was
very successful. Derek Eldridge was the chairman of the working party, I was
the secretary and Bill Talbot was the
The 1901
planning was so successful that we decided to look at the feasibility of a cheaper system, below 1901, to sell in the
£40-50,000 market. We defined it in a WP and we could achieve the costs,
performance and other key parameters. The proposed system was even planning to
have on line enquiries via a typewriter. But the sales costs, assuming a
reasonable hit rate, ruled it out on profitability and we dropped it. That
established the 1901 as the lower limit
of the 1900 range, and we did not revisit that scene till the 2903 was
introduced in 1973.
In the
meantime Charlie Portman and his 1904 team (they had a head-start as they had
started early from the original FP6000) improved the 1904 into 1904/5 E/F with
microprogrannimg, full 1906 order code and other improvements. We even
introduced a Segmentation and Paging form of addressing as an alternative,
supported by the George 4 Operating System. I remember that Frank Sumner from
I am sure
Charlie will describe all this later. By the way, E stands for
"Enhanced"; I have forgotten what F stood for but it was probably
just the letter after E.
The 1904/5
E/F gave us a 1900 architecture and a template design that was used over and
over without further architectural changes.
As I
mentioned, we had a bit of a problem at the high end of the Range, where we
could not make machines powerful enough to reach the top of the IBM range. To
alleviate this shortfall we took two 1904/5 E/F processors and we tightly
coupled them into a common store to make a "dual", the E/F, with
nearly twice the power of a single 1904E/F. The Operating system was scheduling
the work between the two processors, and the user could look at them as a
single resource. This "anonymous
multiprocessor" design gave us valuable experience for future systems.
By then it
was 1966. That was the time when there was plenty of talk about a
Supercomputer: Project51, Project52, the "three wise men" and so on.
Having just designed the dual 1906/7 E/F and a good Segmentation and
Paging scheme, we proposed a 1908, a tightly coupled multiprocessor tying four
powerful processors together into a large common store. But the proposal was
overtaken by events.
We came
out of this first phase with a well understood architecture and some stable
designs. By then we had also identified
some major weaknesses in the architecture that we were unable to correct. We
knew by then that, on the long term, we would need to introduce a new range to replace the 1900.
The second
phase of development applied advanced technologies to the well bedded and fully
understood design, keeping the architecture stable and exploiting modularity.
Thus we
were able, by intercepting the rapidly advancing IC technologies, to keep the
1900 Range competitive and profitable till the mid 70’s, while starting to
withdraw development resources from 1969 onwards , increasingly focusing our
resources 0n the “
It is
interesting to look back at some of the factors that I think were important
(they certainly helped me) in achieving such a good result from the very
limited resources that we had.
a)Flexible and open Architecture: The
1900 architecture, though with a number of recognised shortcomings, was very
open and could be evolved quickly. The 1900 Executives were a major factor in
the flexibility of the Architecture. They provided an interface between the
hardware and the rest of the software, absorbing the changes and enhancements
in the hardware and providing a stable compatible interface across the range in
its successive manifestations. We were able to decouple the hardware and
software developments. Additionally, the Executives enabled systems to be
delivered without waiting for the completion of the 1900 Operating Systems, and
they were a vital factor in being able to deliver the original 1900's starting
in 1965, in advance of IBM. (add main hardware changes ie multis, paging, etc)
b) Range compatibility was strictly adhered to. A Compatibility
Committee chaired by Bruce Paterson controlled it. In principle at least all
software run on all systems given adequate system resources. A number of time,
during the active development life of the 1900, it was thought very desirable
to change one member of the range to get a better system in that slot of the
market, but it was always turned down, even if, because of that decision, the
product had to be abandoned.
c)Modularity: The ICT Standard Interface
(specified by Ron Feather at
But in ICT
we exploited the portability that the ICT Standard Interfaces gave us very
strongly as a Marketing tools and as a effort saving tool in development. Very
soon other interfaces became established, like the store-processor interface
for the upper subrange, that enable modular development, multiprocessors and
the design of later enhancements .
d)Rapid application of technology: Technology was procured externally. It forced
us to look outside. We developed a good understanding of what was going on in
the Industry and what the technology trends were and we had access to the most
up to date technologies, that our engineers learned to apply very rapidly.
Besides
these technical factors, some organisational factors are worth noting:
e)Working together: ICL united (everybody
working together). When we needed to define a system, we used to call together
a working party representing all interests (Planning, Marketing, Development,
etc.) to tap all the expertise. Usually
a working party sat part time for two or three months . Between meetings,
members were going back to their unit to consult widely with all experts (for
example the development people might already be doing some pilot work on the
new system and would input their initial experience). The new system under
consideration was defined, and then put to the development Committee for
approval. It worked well because we all knew that we only had one shot: If a
development was wrongly specified, or, for some reason, failed to deliver the
end system, it would leave a big hole in the range. We could not afford to have
parallel competing developments for the same end system. (But West
Gorton-Stevenage constructive competition kept the development up to the
leading edge of technology).
The
Working Party mechanism was first used to specify the 1901, immediately after
the 1900 announcement. It worked so well that I continued to use that mechanism
for all the new systems that I planned and defined up to 1968, when I moved out
of Product Planning.
g)The
working party mechanism was complemented by
rapid decisions by the Development Committee. The
definition of the system, as developed by the appropriate working party, was
costed and with a Market assessment, proposed resource allocation and costs and
profitability analysis, it would be submitted to the Development Committee, the
final authority. It usually got approved within one week of submission,
eliminating confusion and uncertainty. When the development got approved, all I
needed was a few phone calls, and the project hit the deck already running: all
the members of the working party were back in senior position in their teams,
fully informed and committed to project .
h)Focusing of development: Only the 1900
specific system components had priority in the allocation of resources. Outside
procurement of all non essential subsystems (non 1900 specific) became the norm
. And we turned this into an advantage, by introducing quickly “state of the art”
components purchased from outside.
Looking at
the competitive position in 1974 in terms of commercial performance, we can see
that ICL (as it had then become) had improved the span of the range covered by
single processor systems and was delivering
1900 systems (the S and T series)
using advanced designs with "state of the art" technology. We still
priced our systems 5% below IBM on the "value for money" platform.
Besides
maintaining the range competitive, we had introduced the 2903 ( a new 1900
compatible system) below the bottom of the 1900 range to compete with the IBM
System 3 and we had announced and we were well advanced in the development of
the three top models of the 2900 systems, the “New Range”.
But even
after the introduction of the
But from the
development point of view we can look at the 1900 Range as having two different
and distinct phases.
An initial phase exploring
the limits of the architecture and establishing the shape of the range without
major changes in technology, followed by a phase of rapid application of
advanced technologies to the well bedded, stable and understood architecture.
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Ann. 28 Sept ‘64
1906/7 1906/7 E/F 1904/5 1904/5 E/F 1909 1903 1902 1901
Arch .Dev. Phase |
The 1900
weaknesses I mentioned earlier were of course only weaknesses on the long term.
On the medium term the 1900 had plenty of life left, especially in the lower
part of the market.
But in
1968 the merger with English Electric with its System 4 range had added a new
urgency to the introduction of a much more drastically changed