28jan2011 [25] Memories from Chris Morris
Good to find this site as I joined ICT in the summer of 1965 (I think) on my discharge from the RAF. My RAF service had been as an Air Radar Fitter (Fighter), having joined up as a Boy Entrant (32nd Entry) in 1957, served as an instructor at Cosford for two years as well as spending time at RAF Duxford, Watisham, and Henlow. My EMIDEC training took place at Stevenage and on completion of the course was assigned to the Ministry of Labour site in Watford as the junior site technician. The electronics was the easy part of working on the system for as far as I can recall. We had plenty of modules to repair and time to do them. What took me time was handling the printer, a SAMAS something or another. 130 character dot matrix printer that could do "page throws" right across the room. The name of the support technician who could do anything mechanical escapes me. But I recall that he raced motor bikes in an earlier life. My favorite pieces of the system were the 1 inch tape decks. 120 inches per second. Great fun getting these to perform at their best. Was sent up to Boots in Nottingham as a replacement technician for a few days and found their tape decks were in a very poor state. The worst problem that we had on the Watford system in my time there was a dropped EOP. But it happened only from time to time, creating a real crisis. Traced eventually to a bouncing contact in the main power switch box... My personal crisis was one late night shift when testing repaired modules after the live runs stopped at about midnight. Can't remember any detail of the problem, but just got the system running again about 30 minutes before we were scheduled to hand it back to the customer the next morning... Nick Meyer was one of the support engineers that I remember. I still know him and he lives in France near Geneva. Another of the "good guys" that I met again during my 25 years working for Digital Equipment Corp (DEC), in Reading and Geneva after leaving Watford. The only computer that I had seen prior to joining ICT was at the Royal Air Force Radar Research Establishment at Malvern in either late 1958 or early 1959. Lots of valves and CRTs. Many thanks for your interesting site about this early system.
Link to Computer history site with lots of links https://www.emidec.org.uk/emihhw.htm
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