The Atlas story. Simon Lavington. Second edition, 6 th December 2012. Contents. Introduction page 1 Birth pains 1 Atlas at Manchester 1 Ferranti and the market place 5 Timeline 6 Technical innovations: facts and figures 6 The London Atlas 8 The Chilton Atlas 9 The Atlas 2 developments 11 Titan at Cambridge 13 Atlas 2 at AWRE Aldermaston 13 Atlas 2 at the CAD centre 13 More technical details of Atlas installations 15 Physical layout 17 Organisation of the Atlas storage hierarchy 17 Format of an Atlas instruction. 19 Guide to the Atlas Supervisor 20 People and places 21 More information 22 Originally produced for the Atlas Symposium held on 5 th December 2012 in the School of Computer Science, Kilburn Building, University of Manchester. It is a pleasure to acknowledge the help given by many former Atlas pioneers in the writing of this brochure. Comments on the text are welcomed and should be sent to Simon Lavington :
[email protected] Picture credits to copyright holders. Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge: Figure 9 Graham Penning: Figure 10 Simon Lavington: Figure 3 Iain MacCallum: Front cover Museum of Science & Industry, Manchester Figures 1, 2, 4, 5, 6 STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory: Figures 7a, 7b, 8 (On 5 th December the original printed version of this document had a cover design based on photographs of the Atlas at Manchester University in 1963). i By the end of 1955 there were less than 16 production digital computers in use in the UK. They were of five British designs, from five different companies, and were single-user systems with practically no systems software.