COMPUTERS OF THAT PERIOD REQUIRED AIRCONDITIONED ROOMS
Footage from the era shows lab-coated scientists carefully measuring cracked eggs and weighing chicks with computers in the background, their tapes moving backwards and forwards. “We also have some pictures that have chickens sitting on top of the actual computer,” said Kevin Murrell, co-founder of The National Museum of Computing. “I think that was a bit staged, to be honest.”
Indeed, computers of that period required air-conditioned rooms and the Elliot 803 cost upwards of £30,000, making it a rather pricey hen coop. Given that the company was now tracking the condition of millions of eggs, it was also vital. “Keeping track of which chickens are best and which process is producing the best eggs, that’s quite data-intensive,” said Murrell. “I think they really ran out of scope with the punch card system. It was too difficult to keep track of that many punch cards… but with a computer system they could actually store the information and reprocess it.”
The Elliot 803’s arrival affected the day-today work of the scientists in the labs, rather than those caring for or breeding the animals. So how did the scientists feel about their new mechanical colleague? “They loved it, absolutely loved it,” said Murrell. “We’ve been in touch with various people who worked in the organisation and felt that they were sort of the cutting edge. Very few companies had computers at that stage — the big banks and big organisations [did], but to be doing that up in the wilds of Yorkshire was pretty exciting.”
What was good for people wasn’t the same for the animals, however — Murrell pointed to the processes designed on the Elliot 803 as the beginning of battery-farmed chickens.
COUNTING ON COMPUTERS
Early computers did end battery behaviour against some creatures in Oxford in the late 1940s: new graduates. At the Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Harwell, graduates were employed as “human computers” to run through “huge mathematical problems” by hand. “They would work though problems that would take days and weeks,” said Murrell. “A desperate job.”
The clever sorts running the electronics division at Harwell were “sort of embarrassed” by the situation, feeling like they should be able to come up with a better solution. In 1949 they did, beginning the three-year build of the Harwell computer. The two-and-a-half ton behemoth used dekatron tubes for volatile memory, with input via paper tape.
Despite the drudgery of maths by hand, the human number-crunchers weren’t convinced by the Harwell — and weren’t worried it would steal their jobs. “I talked to one of the human computers, as they were known, that actually worked on this when the machine arrived,” said Murrell. “They were all very doubtful that this machine would do the job.”
“There were never any worries in those days that the machine was going to steal jobs,” he added. “The concerns were it wouldn’t work, it wouldn’t be as accurate as the mathematicians, as reliable or as flexible. It took some time for that to be proved.”
It eventually proved its worth by running the same calculations as one of the mathematicians in charge, Bart Fossey, to check for accuracy. It has since gone down in history as a race of machine versus man, and though Fossey denies it was ever intended as such, he was willing to recreate the race when the Harwell was rebuilt at The National Museum of Computing in 2012. “Bart’s getting on, well into his 80s, but he was like lightning,” said Murrell. “He kept going for about 20 minutes, then decided that the machine was perfectly okay.”
While Fossey has no trouble solving complicated equations at speed, it’s not a skill that’s required anymore. “To sit down doing that sort of arithmetic accurately for hours and hours… I couldn’t say whether we’ve lost [the ability], but I’m sure you couldn’t find anyone you could persuade to do it,” he said.
Indeed, dropping drudgery was one reason why the computer was welcomed. “In that particular case, these bright maths graduates were able to do more interesting work and leave the donkey work to the computer,” Murrell said. “Once the initial sort of worries around whether it would actually do the job were over, everybody thought it was an excellent new machine. It was an exciting and thrilling time with new electronics around.”
LEGACY COMPUTING
Britain led the charge of computing, finding uses for machines that the academics who designed them would never have dreamed of. We didn’t search specifically for local examples for this article; Britain is simply where most of the innovation was happening in business computing. “In the 1960s… the UK was certainly up with the very best,” said Frank Land.
So how did our pioneering reputation gradually fall away? Frank Land pins the demise of British computing on decisions by the government in 1968 to consolidate the nascent business-machine market into one company. “Unfortunately, in my opinion, they separated the defence computing industry from the commercial, so we never had the symbiosis that the Americans had, with IBM doing both military and commercial computers. We lost out on that.”
Land admits many will disagree with his assessment, but IBM of course remains while LEO disappeared into obscurity, merging into English Electric, then International Computers Limited before disappearing into Fujitsu. Lyons followed a similar track, with mergers, spin-offs and buyouts fading the name into history.
While the brands and the technology itself have vanished, the effect on how people live and work remains. In the hope that basic maths skills aren’t lost forever, Murrell still likes to try adding up his fish-and-chips order in his head to the amazement of the local teenagers staffing the shop. It’s a small example, but “quite important,” he said. We need to avoid losing such skills so we can – like Bart Fossey – continue to check if the machines are making mistakes. “That’s important and possibly becoming lost,” he laments.