ABSTRACT
PEGASUS AND OTHER ANIMALS
Prof. Simon Lavington
Dept. of Computer Science, University of Essex
The Ferranti Pegasus computer, of which 40 were built between 1956 and
1962, was the culmination of a number of digital designs which grew from
an Admiralty contract in 1947 for a high-speed on-line parallel controller
for naval gunnery. This talk will cover various aspects of the early
British computers produced by Elliott Brothers (London) Ltd. and Ferranti
Ltd.,
and the influence of pioneers such as Tom Kilburn and Christopher Strachey
on the development of general register-set architectures.
Footnote: the last working Pegasus, installed in May 2001 in a special
section of the Computing Gallery at the Science Museum, spent much of its
life at UCL.
Maintained by rbennett@cs.ucl.ac.uk