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Photos: IBM from Spitfires to Sphynxes

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  • Big Blue's development lab at Hursley turns 50

    The IBM development laboratory at Hursley House celebrates its 50th birthday this month. Over the last half-century, the lab has seen many developments in storage and display created there.

    The house and grounds have a history that dates back to Roman settlement, while its heritage as an engineering site precedes IBM's arrival.

    During the 1940s, the house was given over to aerospace engineers at Vickers who used it to develop the Supermarine Spitfire fighter plane. What is now a conference hall on the ground floor was at that time used as a testing bay for Rolls Royce Merlin engines.

    Photo credit: Julian Goldsmith/silicon.com

    Caption by: Julian Goldsmith

  • The house's owner was a passionate supporter of the British war effort in the 1940s and bankrupted himself and his family funding it. In the late 1950s the house was put on the market and IBM stepped in to acquire it.

    One of the technologies on display at the house is this TROS memory core, one of the first projects to come from Hursley after IBM bought the site. It is solid state technology, combining two layers of capacitors, resistors and transistors, all hand-wired and mounted on a solid aluminium base.

    This component stored 112 bytes of data.

    Photo credit: Julian Goldsmith/silicon.com

    Caption by: Julian Goldsmith

  • The Dolphin cartridge drive is one of the many widely used devices that owes its existence to Hursley. It holds about 20MB of data…

    Photo credit: Julian Goldsmith/silicon.com

    Caption by: Julian Goldsmith

  • …That means, the capacity on 100 of these devices equates to just one modern USB 2GB memory stick.

    Photo credit: Julian Goldsmith/silicon.com

    Caption by: Julian Goldsmith

  • This PC was built for school use. It dates back to 1969, when man first walked on the moon, Led Zeppelin recorded their first album and more importantly, Unix was invented at Bell Labs.

    It connects to a TV and uses a four-track tape recorder to load programs. This unit is still in working order - note the non-Qwerty keyboard used for programming in machine code.

    Photo credit: Julian Goldsmith/silicon.com

    Caption by: Julian Goldsmith

  • This unit - one of the first full-colour displays, was designed in Hursley.

    Some 1.2 million of these displays were originally manufactured, however, when the curator of the exhibition put out a call for an example, he could only unearth six working units.

    Photo credit: Julian Goldsmith/silicon.com

    Caption by: Julian Goldsmith

  • The Piccolo drive came in three formats of three, six and eight disk platters to provide 29MB to 64MB of data.

    A case would have been fitted around the sturdy frame seen here and each drive would have been mounted on a rack.

    This drive was a prolific computing component and it was common to have rooms full of them handling corporate data.

    Photo credit: Julian Goldsmith/silicon.com

    Caption by: Julian Goldsmith

  • Hursley was at one time a hotbed of display technology design. This is a prototype projector called the Sphynx.

    The display uses a method called photochromics, which refers to chemical compounds that react to light but change back to their normal state when the light is removed.

    While sophisticated, the technology was too expensive to bring the projector into production. Only 50 were made in the mid 1980s and this is the last surviving example.

    Photo credit: Julian Goldsmith/silicon.com

    Caption by: Julian Goldsmith

  • This luggable PC was developed in 1985. The gas plasma screen technology, along with other design features, originated at the lab.

    Later designs weighed as little as 20lbs.

    This example still works and is running a version of OS2 Warp 2.

    Photo credit: Julian Goldsmith/silicon.com

    Caption by: Julian Goldsmith

  • The Gulliver hard drive was used to develop a prototype 9235 appliance.

    In development, engineers were forced to add two extra platters to react to the rapidly growing demand for more memory.

    Photo credit: Julian Goldsmith/silicon.com

    Caption by: Julian Goldsmith

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Big Blue's development lab at Hursley turns 50

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Big Blue's development lab at Hursley turns 50

The IBM development laboratory at Hursley House celebrates its 50th birthday this month. Over the last half-century, the lab has seen many developments in storage and display created there.

The house and grounds have a history that dates back to Roman settlement, while its heritage as an engineering site precedes IBM's arrival.

During the 1940s, the house was given over to aerospace engineers at Vickers who used it to develop the Supermarine Spitfire fighter plane. What is now a conference hall on the ground floor was at that time used as a testing bay for Rolls Royce Merlin engines.

Photo credit: Julian Goldsmith/silicon.com

Caption by: Julian Goldsmith

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