Laboratory on the right the lines: A mobile laboratory, which includes Hewlett-Packard equipment, is currently being used by British Rail in experiments it is conducting on Inter-City express trains. Known as Test Coach Mercury, the laboratory is being used between London and Birmingham. If successful, the experiments could form the basis of a system which would display information to drivers about the running of their trains.

The OCR wand casts its spell on the PoS market: The low-cost OCR wand, based on LSI technology, which is being developed by Recognition Equipment, has a wide range of applications with terminals, point-of-sale units, and is also expected to be of interest to banks. The wand is based on a 2.5 mm high solid state LSI chip in its nose which incorporates a 16 by 38 matrix of light sensitive elements.

London link to Arpanet enables otherwise impossible UK research projects to get off the ground: The London link to Arpanet is now in its eighth month of full operation, and at a Users Meeting in mid-March, no fewer than 50 representatives from 16 universities and 13 research establishments attended. Already several research projects have been started in the UK which would not have been possible without access to the network.

Microprocessor bid by Ferranti: In a bid to stake a claim in the world microprocessor market which, it is estimated, will be worth £500 million by 1980, Ferranti is developing its own “computer on a chip”. The F100L, as the new unit is known, is due to become available in 12 to 18 months’ time at a price of about £150 for OEM quantities. Manufacture of the 16-bit microprocessor will utilise the collector diffusion isolation LSI technique developed by Ferranti for fabrication of integrated circuits.

NPL, Iria networks in Anglo-French link: The first test of “host-to-host” protocols between the National Physical Laboratory’s computer network and the French Cyclades network are expected to be made next week. A CTL Modular One on the NPL network is linked via Codex modems and a 9,600 baud line to one of the five CII Mitra 15s which make up Cigale, the Cyclades network switching system. Communication with the Mitra 15 mini, which is at Iria, the
Institut de Recherche d’lnformatique et d’Automatique has been at the lowest level using the IBM BSC line control protocol, which has been adopted for Cyclades because of the IBM machine on the network, and on top of that packet formats have been transmitted.

UK police databank goes live; Two years after the installation of a twin Burroughs 6700 system, the first phase of the Police National Computer project has been completed. This is regarded as a milestone by both Burroughs and the Hoskyns Group, which has been responsible for software development. The computers, which are situated at Hendon, in North
London, form the heart of a nationwide network giving police forces throughout the country access to 5,000 million characters of information via 800 VDUs and associated printers, 300 of which have been installed so far.

PSI aids colour TV; Special software written for a Digital Equipment PDP-8 by Programming and Systems Implementation Ltd has produced improvements in inspection routines for high precision shadow masks used in the manufacture of colour TV tubes at Thorn Electric’s Skelmersdale plant.

Com-Share’s DBMS aids navigation system evaluation: The latest series of efficiency evaluations to be performed on Decca Navigator’s Omnitrack air navigation system is to be aided by the use of the Composit 77 database management system, provided by Com-Share’s London bureau. Omnitrack is based on a Decca minicomputer carried on board the aircraft. This operates a moving map display, according to data from the aircraft’s internal instruments, thus enabling its position to be deduced without reference to signals from ground stations.