Fifty Years Ago .... from the pages of Computer Weekly
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August 1976 computing, compiled by TNMOC volunteer archivist, Brian Aldous.
A selection of stories from Computer Weekly from August 1976. The full archive of Computer Weekly can be seen at TNMOC, where there are special rolling displays of front pages from 25 and 40 years ago.
I am very sad to report that this will be Brian’s final Computer Weekly summary for TNMOC. He passed away on 7th August, 2026 surrounded by his family. He will be sadly missed by all who knew him at the Museum and we all thank him for his dedication and humour, and for supporting the museum for so many years. RIP Brian.
Peter Vaughan - TNMOC volunteer
Barclays to speed customer account inquiry service:
Unwieldy masses of paper printout sent daily by Barclays Bank to its 3,000 branches are to be replaced by COM generated microfiche. The bank has ordered COM equipment worth £1 million from Kodak, including nine KOM-8O intelligent recorders. This will make Barclays one of the biggest COM users in the world and will give it huge spare capacity. It hopes to sell this through the Baric bureau which it owns jointly with ICL. According to Barclays, Kodak is able to satisfy its special requirement for software to carry out extensive checking and logging of customer account records being transferred from magnetic tape to microfiche. The software runs on the Hewlett-Packard minicomputer that front ends the KOM-8O and accepts standard print tapes from Barclays’ IBM370/168 mainframes. It formats the customer account records for filming and generates a title and index for each microfiche. Barclays put two KOM-8OS on trial at its Manchester computer centre last year and the bank is to install a further machine there and three at each of its two centres in London. When fully operational, the nine recorders will generate 3,000 master microfiche every evening, one for each Barclays branch in the UK. Each fiche will hold an average of 4,000 single line customer account records, and each record will include the customer’s name, number and balance as at the end of that day. (CW 509 5/8/1976 p8)
On-schedule 2980 boosts ICL EEC hopes:
A major boost for ICL’s top-of-the-line 2980 comes with the news that the machine ordered by the New Zealand State Services Commission has passed all its commissioning tests and went live on time on July 1, a date set over 18 months ago. This success is all the more encouraging in view of the rumours which have circulated about the 2980s at both Bureau West and the European Space Agency running into trouble. It should also engender confidence in the machine at EEC headquarters, where a decision has to be made shortly on the computer to replace the IBM 370/145 at the Luxembourg computer centre. ICL is way out in front as the leading contender, because Siemens, the only other wholly European company, has nothing powerful enough to meet the EEC’s requirements, and ICL’s New Zealand success is particularly relevant, because the applications run by the State Services Commission are similar to those that the EEC requires. (CW 510 12/8/1976 p1)
Ex-CRC boss in OCR venture:
Accurate high speed reading of hand printed alphanumeric characters at reasonable cost, something that OCR equipment manufacturers have been working on for years, looks like being achieved by Pulse Train Technology, an R&D company set up by Alan Hendrickson, the former managing director of the CRC Group. Talking to Computer Weekly at his spacious Esher, Surrey, home, which doubles as the headquarters for Pulse Train Technology, Hendrickson said that the system being developed could have a “shattering effect” on data capture when it comes on the market. He explained that his interest in character recognition stems from his days as a psychology student at London University in the early sixties. There, he became interested in neurobiology, in particular the way that the brain recognises information picked up by the eyes. His full time work on this was cut short when he became caught up in the meteoric rise of CRC. This started as a university department processing psychology research statistics and developed into one of the biggest bureaux in the UK, with its market research services, its Cybernet timesharing network and SCAN service for stockbrokers. Hendrickson still retains a major share in the firm. About four years ago he began to seriously investigate the feasibility of a character recognition system that could “learn” to read any specified set of characters, in the same way that the human eye and brain do, and with a small team of programmers and engineers, he came up with a design that has now been patented in the UK, the US, West Germany and Japan. The patented recognition unit will form the heart of a powerful optical character reading system which should be ready for demonstration in prototype early next year. The recognition unit comprises high speed bipolar image processing logic linked to a PROM holding the digitised images of 64 characters. These could be any machine printed fount or a set of hand printed letters, numerals and symbols. (CW 511 19/8/1976 p2)
Bank on-line with 1902T:
The move from batch to mostly on-line working by one of the City’s leading merchant banks, Morgan Grenfell, has led to the enhancement of the bank’s computing facilities by the addition of an ICL 1902T. The bank, an ICL user since 1969, already has a 1903A. Morgan Grenfell’s on-line systems include an investment appraisal system which enables staff, equipped with ICL Termi-printers linked to the mainframes, to evaluate corporate finance methods and capital equipment leases. The bank was the first company to buy 7503 and 7502 terminal processors, which it uses to handle a real time foreign exchange system, providing immediately up-to-date information on clients and the market. (CW 512 26/8/1976 p7)
