History lesson: dataSTREAM and The City of London

[JohnM]

Seeing the post on the main forum about RLWC to Close the London Stock Exchange today, Friday, took me back a mere 50 years to 1971 when I was a young systems commissioning engineer. One project was the commissioning of a front end processor that sat behind an IBM mainframe and controlled a network of vdus and plotters in stockbrokers offices in the City and beyond, from Hoare and Company, Govette in King Street, in the City.The project was called dataSTREAM . The story is remarkable as this lengthy account shows.Stick with it or skim read it.

For me, this was my first ever visit to a City broker. The presence of our high-tech real-time computer -probably 6 or 7 19 inch battleship grey racks, six feet high, in a wood panelled room smelling of Mansion furniture polish,  was somewhat disconcerting. Rumour has it that the racks were that colour because we had lots of paint leftvover from a huge contract to build Bloodhound II guided missile launch control computers. As stated in the article, the vdus were encased in teak for the subscribing brokers posh offices.  The biggest challenge, I think, was working out how, in 1971, we could install such a terminal on Graham Blease's boat on the south coast. ( might be apocryphal ).

Whenever the dataSTREAM boss, Graham Blease came to assess progress, he swept in..and out... with a retinue of followers. We didn't quite doff our caps...but would have done so had we been wearing them.

Remember, All this started more than 50 years ago. An insight into someones foresight. ...and an old man's reminiscences .

https://datastream-history.co.uk/

[JonM]

Was this the Ferranti Argus? Presumably using silicon transistors by this point?