Software and Applications at Borehamwood

Software is an ephemeral artifact. Programmers are, of course, tangible but the results of their labours survive more in the consequences than in the detail. This chapter and the next can only give a mere glimpse, through the eyes of the participants, of what it was like to program and market the Elliott digital computers that emerged from Borehamwood in the period 1947–1967. The machines themselves are summarised in Table 8.1, which is similar to the table given in the Introduction to this book but with the 900 series computers split into two rows. This split indicates that the development of the 900 series machines continued at Rochester for aerospace applications, long after Elliott-Automation itself had been taken over by GEC in 1968.

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