Working at Marconi Space and Weapons, James learned to program an Elliott 4130 computer. Although the technology had advanced from tubes to transistors, this computer was still very large, and with its input / output interfaces, it took up a whole room. James‘s job was to debug the interface between this computer and a flight simulator. The flight simulator was set up like the Nimrod aircraft navigation station and used an analog-to-digital interface to connect the various switch panels, joysticks and displays of the navigation station to the 4130 computer.
June 24, 2008 at 7:19 pm |
I worked at Elliot Brothers/Marconi Space and Defence Ltd’s Hillend factory from March 1970 to March 1973.
The computer room in the picture brought nack memories.
There were some very talented engineers and programmers at the Hillend factory, but their efforts never seemed to get attention.
I realised that, compared to them, I was not very skilled, and moved on to other places.
MB
June 25, 2008 at 2:33 am |
Hi Morgan,
I also worked at Elliot Brothers Hillend factory from Feb 1969 to April 1970.
It appears that we may have just missed one another. I worked there as a product development engineer: developing the 12 bit analog to digital convertor for use
in NIMROD simulator.
My boss was Peter Williamson. His boss was Peter Hand, the Chief Technical Officer. I worked with my colleague Gordon Menzies, developing interfaces for the Elliot 4130 computer.
If you should know any of these people or can tell more about what you were working on at Elliot’s please email me (finella@rocisland.com) so we can talk further.
Jim Allan
June 25, 2008 at 5:43 pm |
Hotmail does not like finella@rocisland.com. If you email me directly at
morgan_butler@hotmail.com with an alternative, I’ll give it a try.