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Elliott Brothers (London) Ltd was an early
computer company of the 1950s–60s in the
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the European mainland, continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...
. It traced its descent from a firm of instrument makers founded by
William Elliott (1780 or 1781-1853) in London around 1804. The research laboratories were originally set up in 1946 at
Borehamwood
Borehamwood (, historically also Boreham Wood) is a town in southern Hertfordshire, England, from Charing Cross. Borehamwood has a population of 31,074, and is within the London commuter belt. The town's film and TV studios are commonly know ...
and the first
Elliott 152 computer appeared in 1950.
In its day the company was very influential. The computer scientist
Bobby Hersom was an employee from 1953-1954, and Sir
Tony Hoare
Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare (Tony Hoare or C. A. R. Hoare) (born 11 January 1934) is a British computer scientist who has made foundational contributions to programming languages, algorithms, operating systems, formal verification, and ...
was an employee there from August 1960 to 1968. He wrote an
ALGOL 60 compiler
In computing, a compiler is a computer program that translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primarily used for programs tha ...
for the
Elliott 803
The Elliott 803 is a small, medium-speed transistor digital computer which was manufactured by the British company Elliott Brothers in the 1960s. About 211 were built.
History
The 800 series began with the 801, a one-off test machine built in ...
. He also worked on an operating system for the new Elliott 503 Mark II computer. The founder of the UK's first
software house
A software company is a company whose primary products are various forms of software, software technology, distribution, and software product development. They make up the software industry.
Types
There are a number of different types of softw ...
,
Dina St Johnston, had her first programming job there from 1953–1958, and
John Lansdown pioneered the use of
computers as an aid to planning on an Elliott 803 computer in 1963. In 1966 the company established an
integrated circuit design and manufacturing facility in
Glenrothes
Glenrothes (; , ; sco, Glenrothes; gd, Gleann Rathais) is a town situated in the heart of Fife, in east-central Scotland. It is about north of Edinburgh and south of Dundee. The town had a population of 39,277 in the 2011 census, making it ...
,
Scotland
Scotland (, ) is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. Covering the northern third of the island of Great Britain, mainland Scotland has a Anglo-Scottish border, border with England to the southeast ...
, followed by a
metal–oxide semiconductor
A semiconductor is a material which has an electrical conductivity value falling between that of a conductor, such as copper, and an insulator, such as glass. Its resistivity falls as its temperature rises; metals behave in the opposite way. ...
(MOS) research laboratory.
In 1967, Elliott Automation was merged into the English Electric company and in 1968 the computer part of the company was taken over by
International Computers and Tabulators
International Computers and Tabulators or ICT was a British computer manufacturer, formed in 1959 by a merger of the British Tabulating Machine Company (BTM) and Powers-Samas. In 1963 it acquired the business computer divisions of Ferranti. It ...
(ICT).
Origins
William Elliott was born in either 1780 or 1781 and apprenticed to the instrument maker William Blackwell in 1795. In 1804, Elliott began his own company to make drawing instruments, scales, and scientific instruments. In 1850, his two sons Charles and Fredrick joined his business. The company prospered, and manufactured a range of surveying, navigational, and other instruments. William Elliott died in 1853. In the 1850s the company began manufacturing electrical instruments, which were used by researchers such as
James Clerk Maxwell
James Clerk Maxwell (13 June 1831 – 5 November 1879) was a Scottish mathematician and scientist responsible for the classical theory of electromagnetic radiation, which was the first theory to describe electricity, magnetism and li ...
and others. Charles Elliott retired in 1865, and when Frederick died in 1873 he left the business to his wife Susan.
In 1876, the company expanded to a new factory to manufacture telegraph equipment and instruments for the British Admiralty. There was increased demand for electrical switchboards for the growing electric power industry. Susan Elliott became partners with
Willoughby Smith
Willoughby Smith (6 April 1828, in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk – 17 July 1891, in Eastbourne, Sussex) was an English electrical engineer who discovered the photoconductivity of the element selenium. This discovery led to the invention of photoele ...
, who had significant expertise in telegraphic instruments; she was the last Elliott family member associated with the company when she died in 1880. Smith in turn brought his sons in to manage the company operations.
In 1893, the instrument making company ''Theilers'' joined Elliotts, with W. O. Smith and G. K. E. Elphinstone as managers. Elphinstone had useful connections with the British Navy. He was knighted for his contributions at Elliotts during World War I, with developments in gunnery instruments for the Navy.
[Simon Lavington, ''Moving Targets: Elliott-Automation and the Dawn of the Computer Age in Britain, 1947 – 67'', Springer Science & Business Media, 2011 pages 13-17]
In 1898, the company moved out of London to a new site in Kent. One of the main products at this site was naval gunnery tables, which were mechanical analog computers, which were manufactured until after the Second World War. Aircraft instruments became an important product line with the development of heavier than air flight; instruments such as tachometers and altimeters were vital in aviation. In 1916, the company changed its name to Elliott Brothers (London), Limited.
[http://rochesteravionicarchives.co.uk/about-us/history-elliott-brothers/ ''History of Elliott Brothers'', retrieved 2017 Oct 12] In 1920,
Siemens Brothers
Siemens Brothers and Company Limited was an electrical engineering design and manufacturing business in London, England. It was first established as a branchThe company started with a small factory at 12 Millbank Row, Westminster SW1, London, nea ...
started purchasing shares of the company.
The end of Admiralty contracts after the war severely affected Elliott Brothers, which had not been involved in radar and electronics technology during the war. Siemens Brothers had sold their interest in the company, and a new director,
Leon Bagrit
Sir Leon Bagrit (13 March 1902 – 22 April 1979) was a leading British industrialist and pioneer of automation.
Early life and education
Born to Jewish parents in Kiev, in the Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine), Sir Leon studied law at B ...
, was instrumental in rebuilding and redirecting the firm into new areas.
In 1946,
John Flavell Coales
John Flavell Coales CBE, FRS (14 September 1907 – 6 June 1999) was a British physicist and engineer. He started the Borehamwood laboratory of the Elliott Brothers company in 1946.
Coales graduated in 1929 from Sydney Sussex College, Cambri ...
founded the Research Laboratories of Elliott Brothers at Borehamwood. This laboratory was the site of development of radar systems for the Government, and in 1947 produced a stored-program digital computer. By 1950 the laboratory had a staff of 450, and had developed the commercial Elliott 401 computer. In 1953, Elliott formed an "Aviation Division" at
Borehamwood
Borehamwood (, historically also Boreham Wood) is a town in southern Hertfordshire, England, from Charing Cross. Borehamwood has a population of 31,074, and is within the London commuter belt. The town's film and TV studios are commonly know ...
.
[ In 1957, the company changed its name to Elliott Automation Ltd.
By 1966, Elliott Automation had started their own semiconductor factory at Glenrothes, Scotland. The company had about 35,000 employees. In 1967 Elliott Automation was merged into the English Electric company.][
]
Elliott Automation
''Elliott Automation'' (as it had become) merged with English Electric in 1967. The data processing computer part of the company was then taken over by International Computers and Tabulators
International Computers and Tabulators or ICT was a British computer manufacturer, formed in 1959 by a merger of the British Tabulating Machine Company (BTM) and Powers-Samas. In 1963 it acquired the business computer divisions of Ferranti. It ...
(ICT) in 1968; this marriage was forced by the British Government, who believed that the UK required a strong national computer company. The combined company was called International Computers Limited (ICL). The real-time computer part of Elliott Automation remained, and was renamed Marconi Elliott Computer Systems Limited in 1969 and GEC Computers
GEC Computers Limited was a British computer manufacturing company under the GEC holding company from 1968 until the 1990s.
History
Starting life as Elliott Automation, in 1967–68 the data processing computer products were transferred to I ...
Limited in 1972, and remained at the original Borehamwood research laboratories until the late 1990s. The agreement which governed the split of computer technologies between the two companies disallowed ICT from developing real-time computer systems and disallowed Elliott Automation from developing data processing computer systems for a few years after the split. The remainder of Elliott Automation which produced aircraft instruments and control systems, was retained by English Electric.
EASAMS
''EASAMS'' was E A Space and Advanced Military Systems (the EA was never spelled out), based in Frimley
Frimley is a town in the Borough of Surrey Heath in Surrey, England, approximately southwest of central London. The town is of Saxon origin, although it is not listed in Domesday Book of 1086.
Train services to Frimley (on the line between ...
, Surrey - first at the nearby Marconi Electronic Systems
Marconi Electronic Systems (MES), or GEC-Marconi as it was until 1998, was the defence arm of General Electric Company (GEC). It was demerged from GEC and bought by British Aerospace (BAe) on 30 November 1999 to form BAE Systems. GEC then renam ...
plant in Chobham Road and later, when it became a limited company, at its headquarters in Lyon Way. It evolved its proprietary ''EMPRENT'', an early program evaluation and review technique
The program evaluation and review technique (PERT) is a statistical tool used in project management, which was designed to analyze and represent the tasks involved in completing a given project.
First developed by the United States Navy in ...
(PERT) planning system used in building North Sea
The North Sea lies between Great Britain, Norway, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium. An epeiric sea, epeiric sea on the European continental shelf, it connects to the Atlantic Ocean through the English Channel in the south and the ...
oil platforms, and for the BAC TSR-2
The British Aircraft Corporation TSR-2 is a cancelled Cold War strike and reconnaissance aircraft developed by the British Aircraft Corporation (BAC), for the Royal Air Force (RAF) in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The TSR-2 was designed ...
. Developments for the cancelled TSR-2 were later incorporated into multirole combat aircraft (MRCA), which finally became the Panavia Tornado
The Panavia Tornado is a family of twin-engine, variable-sweep wing multirole combat aircraft, jointly developed and manufactured by Italy, the United Kingdom and West Germany. There are three primary Tornado variants: the Tornado IDS ( in ...
.
EASAMS senior management was highly conservative, and a number of innovative engineers working on 'private venture' projects such as Hierarchical Object-Oriented
Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of " objects", which can contain data and code. The data is in the form of fields (often known as attributes or ''properties''), and the code is in the form of p ...
Design (HOOD) and Ada
Ada may refer to:
Places
Africa
* Ada Foah, a town in Ghana
* Ada (Ghana parliament constituency)
* Ada, Osun, a town in Nigeria
Asia
* Ada, Urmia, a village in West Azerbaijan Province, Iran
* Ada, Karaman, a village in Karaman Province, ...
language development left to form their own firms. These included Admiral Computing (which later merged with Logica
Logica plc was a multinational IT and management consultancy company headquartered in London and later Reading, United Kingdom.
Founded in 1969, the company had offices in London and in a number of major cities across England, Wales and Scot ...
), Systems Designers Ltd (which later merged with Electronic Data Systems (EDS) and later became part of Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Software Sciences (later a part of IBM UK).
EASAMS Ltd was an independent company within General Electric Company plc
The General Electric Company (GEC) was a major British industrial conglomerate involved in consumer and defence electronics, communications, and engineering. The company was founded in 1886, was Britain's largest private employer with over 25 ...
(GEC), founded in 1962 to provide services in system design, operational research
Operations research ( en-GB, operational research) (U.S. Air Force Specialty Code: Operations Analysis), often shortened to the initialism OR, is a discipline that deals with the development and application of analytical methods to improve deci ...
and project management
Project management is the process of leading the work of a team to achieve all project goals within the given constraints. This information is usually described in project documentation, created at the beginning of the development process. T ...
. In the 1990s EASAMS became part of Marconi Electronic Systems
Marconi Electronic Systems (MES), or GEC-Marconi as it was until 1998, was the defence arm of General Electric Company (GEC). It was demerged from GEC and bought by British Aerospace (BAe) on 30 November 1999 to form BAE Systems. GEC then renam ...
before losing its identity.
Computers
The following computer models were produced:
* Elliott 152 (1950)
* Elliott Nicholas (1952)
* Elliott/NRDC 401 (1953) - prototype computer, installed in 1954 at Rothamsted Experimental Station
Rothamsted Research, previously known as the Rothamsted Experimental Station and then the Institute of Arable Crops Research, is one of the oldest agricultural research institutions in the world, having been founded in 1843. It is located at Har ...
* Elliott 153 (DF computer) (1954)
* Elliott/GCHQ OEDIPUS (311) (1954)
* TRIDAC (1954) three-dimensional analogue computer system for guided missile research, built for the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough.
* Elliott 402 (1955)
* Elliott 403 (WREDAC) (1955)
* Elliott 405 (1956) (One donated by Nestle to The Forest School, Winnersh
The Forest School is an all-boys secondary school and mixed sixth form with academy status, located in Winnersh, Berkshire, England. It is located on Robin Hood Lane, the B3030 road, next to Winnersh railway station. Since September 2012, th ...
and named Nellie)
* Elliott 802 (1958–1961) 6 were sold
* Elliott 803
The Elliott 803 is a small, medium-speed transistor digital computer which was manufactured by the British company Elliott Brothers in the 1960s. About 211 were built.
History
The 800 series began with the 801, a one-off test machine built in ...
(1959) about 250 sold, mainly 803B
** 803A had 4 or 8 K of 39-bit words of memory and all internal data was held in one 102-bit long serial path.
** 803B had 4 or 8 K of 39-bit words of memory. The single data path was split into several shorter (48-bit long) serial paths to reduce instruction execution time. A hardware floating point option was available.
* Elliott ARCH 1000 (1962)
* Elliott 503 (1963) software compatible with 803
* Elliott 900 series (1963)
**For military customers there were four models of the 900 series: 920A, 920B, 920M and 920C. Only a few of the 920A were produced, rapidly obsoleted by the faster 920B. The 920M was a miniaturised version of the 920B. They were discrete transistor machines. The 920C was a later even faster derivative built using custom integrated circuits. All were shipped in robust "militarized" cases suitable for mounting in vehicles, ships and aircraft.
**Civilian customers were sold versions of the 920A, 920B and 920C called Elliott 920A, 903 and 905 respectively. These were shipped in desk sized cabinets suitable for use in an office or laboratory environment.
**Versions of the 920B and 920C for industrial automation were sold as Arch 900 and Arch900 respectively. These were shipped in industrial cabinets similar to those used for the civilian systems.
***The 903 was a desk-sized machine popular with universities and colleges as a teaching machine, with small research laboratories as a scientific processor and also as a versatile system for use in industrial process control. It was typically equipped with 8 or 16K of core store and was predominantly a paper tape based machine but card readers, line printers, incremental graph plotters and magnetic tape systems were also available. The machine was usually programmed i
symbolic assembly code, Algol or Fortran II
The civilian 920C was the 905, also in a desk-sized configuration. Some 905s had fixed head disk systems attached. A Fortran IV system was provided for the 905.
* Elliott 502 (1964)
**One 502 used to generate simulated radar signals for training operators of Linesman/Mediator
Linesman/Mediator was a dual-purpose civil and military radar network in the United Kingdom between the 1960s and 1984. The military side (Linesman) was replaced by the Improved United Kingdom Air Defence Ground Environment (IUKADGE), while the ...
system.
* Elliott 4100 series (1966) A joint development with NCR Corporation. Elliott selling to the scientific market and NCR selling to the commercial market.
See also
* BAE Systems Avionics
References
Further reading
* Simon Lavington, Moving Targets: Elliott-Automation and the Dawn of the Computer Age in Britain, 1947–67, Springer, 2011.
* Simon Lavington ed 'Alan Turing and his contemporaries: Building the world's first computers', BCS, 2012
External links
Elliott Computers
Simon Lavington, The Bulletin of the Computer Conservation Society, Number 42, Spring 2008, ISSN 0958-7403
*
Staffordshire University
'Nellie' (Elliott 405) Artefact at The ICL Computer Museum
Thinking Machine
{{Authority control
Defunct computer hardware companies
Defunct computer companies of the United Kingdom
Former defence companies of the United Kingdom
General Electric Company
International Computers Limited
Instrument-making corporations
1804 establishments in the United Kingdom
History of science and technology in the United Kingdom
Companies established in 1804