[ubuntu-uk] Project Proposal - ?Biobuntu?

Tony Arnold tony.arnold at manchester.ac.uk
Sat Oct 14 21:29:59 BST 2006


Michael,

Hi! Good to see an ex Manchester graduate on the list!

On Sat, 2006-10-14 at 15:14 +0100, Michael G. Wilkins wrote:

>     I am an old code pusher/scientist - scientific programming,
> physics, graphics, etc  etc. [The 
> horrors of Fortran77!].  I did do some bsd and Silicon Graphics
> (purple machine)  unix back 
> in the early '80s - '86 or so,

I was heavily into VMS at that time but toyed a little with SunOS and
later HP-UX.

>     A special 'Hello' to Tony Arnold, University of Manchester, simply
> because of his location.  
> 1959, old EE Building, U Manchester is where I was first seduced by
> computers -  the old Ferranti 
> Mercury machine.  Two 8kb disk drives (Wow!), stone tablet input,
> illuminated manuscript output, 
> racks of glowing 6SN7 double triodes ... .  A real computer!  I was an
> undergrad over in Physics, 
> Schuster Building?  Happy memories!  [Got my degree in '61 and
> immediately left for the U.S.A. 
> as part of the 'brain drain', had a semi-decent education and career
> over there for 40+ years].  

Thanks for the special hello! It'a appreciated. I didn't start at
Manchester until 1973, so I missed out on the Mercury and the later
Atlas machine. But there were probably people like Tom Kilburn and Dai
Edwards around at that time who were still in the Computer Science
department when I was there. You may recall it was Tom Kilburn and
Freddy Williams who built the Mark 1 machine which was commercialised as
the Ferranti Mercury machine. I feel it an honour to have known these
people.

Regards,
Tony.
-- 
Tony Arnold, IT Security Coordinator, University of Manchester,
IT Services Division, Kilburn Building, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL.
T: +44 (0)161 275 6093, F: +44 (0)870 136 1004, M: +44 (0)773 330 0039
E: tony.arnold at manchester.ac.uk, H: http://www.man.ac.uk/Tony.Arnold



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