What kind of system is this?

[Roland Huisman]

I found this on youtube... What kind of system is this?
I really love the whole setup

[g4ugm]

Well I worked at Refuge Assurance, Manchester, England and we had a Honeywell H3200 with that sort of disk drive. They were 20Mb and the glass top slid back. Had a smashing experience when an electrician dropped a fluorescent starter choke onto a spinning drive. It was toughened glass and the "crumbs" flew every where.

[Roland Huisman]

Wow that sounds like an expensive happening!

[Chuck(G)]

The tape drives are ICT/ICL units shown here

I suspect the system is an ICL 1900 series machine. Jitze has photos of a ICL 1904 system here where the disk drives are visible. There are other photos on the web.

So tell me what I've won, Johnny...

[MossyRock]

It looks to me that there are at least TWO systems here. I see ICT tape drives - the ones with the tape reels vertically (one over the other) and I see Honeywell disk drives and Honeywell tape drives (the tape drives with the tape reels side-by-side).

I don't think ICT tape drives can attach to a Honeywell system. That's why I think there are two systems.

I also see Honeywell-style lighted operator pushbuttons - they were always VERY stylish.

[Chuck(G)]

I also see a button labeled "Initialise". That's certainly the ICT system, as Honeywell used the US spellings, unless of course, this was a Honeywell piece of equipment marketed by Groupe Bull.

[Gary C]

I also see a button labeled "Initialise". That's certainly the ICT system, as Honeywell used the US spellings, unless of course, this was a Honeywell piece of equipment marketed by Groupe Bull.

Looks too early to be from the period when Bull took over Honeywell's systems I think.

For an even older system, was looking at this today.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/storie...ffice-computer

Now thats a big system

[Chuck(G)]

There was a good article written up about LEO in the IEEE Annals a few years ago. Doubtless there's much more.

Recall that ICT/ICL was descended from the old Elliott Brothers Automation, later merged with English Electric and thence to ICT. There should be quite a bit of stuff on the web.

[RobS]

Yes, there are certainly Honeywell components there and there are also address mode 2, 3 and 4 buttons, which means that it had a large character oriented CPU, so that points to that part being Honeywell. And of course those distinctly stylish buttons are a giveaway although those on that operator panel are recessed, a style that I don't recollect seeing. I don't know how far Honeywell went with interfaces to alien peripherals but the card reader-punch with our machine was, I was told, actually an IBM device rebadged. The Honeywell 200 series peripheral control units were separate from the CPU and used direct memory access, so presumably they could be designed to provide interfaces between it and any alien peripherals. In fact I believe that this was a key design factor when the series was first conceived. The converse was however more tricky, I was told by a Honeywell engineer who worked in the department that continued development of the DDP machines when the company bought CCC and had to interface Honeywell peripherals with them. By acquiring alien systems from CCC and GE Honeywell must have set themselves quite a few interfacing problems.

Is there any evidence in the pictures of any CPU other than a Honeywell one being present or is it just the peripherals that are alien to Honeywell?