🚀 go-pugleaf

This was told to me by Peter Hammersley...is he still in operation?

Ferranti only made three Atlas II's.  One was the Cambridge University
"Titan", and a second was up the road at the CAD Centre (the third was
doing secret things at Aldermaston: the black sheep of the family).

Titan got the new computer lab late in the 60s, so the university
computing service was moved to the CAD Centre for the duration of the
lab switch.  Peter was involved in running the benchmarks just to ensure
the machines operated the same.  They didn't.

It turned out that Titan's floating-point accumulator (a complex beast
with the ability to lock individual words of core while it ruminated)
had been wired up wrong, and nobody had caught it.  The university had
placed great reliance on that faulty machine; Max Perutz (structure of
haemoglobin) and Fred Hoyle were among its users.  No wonder the
steady state theory had problems...
-- 
David Brooks				dbr...@osf.org
Open Software Foundation		uunet!osf.org!dbrooks
Cambridge class of '71 (the real Cambridge)