Description of Photograph

Digital copies of these three photographs were kindly provided by Marilyn Smith, who used the Marconi Myriad computer installed at Marconi Research Labs, Great Baddow.  The Myriad was an early computer designed by Marconi in the 1960s.  It was used largely in aerospace, for civilian and military air traffic control in Sweden and Australia as well as the UK.

Marilyn provided these notes on the machine:

'As well as being used for time series data analysis I believe it was also used to plot tropospheric scatter dish nets and I was told it provided a virtual drawing board ¼ mile wide, used to draw out the components of printed circuit boards. I imagine that the tracker ball was used for this.

The computer was in a 'clean room' but the two terminals were in a room opposite. As well as the equipment seen in the decommissioning photo there were several cabinets as well. I remember playing music by running coded paper tape through the reader. Handel's 'Arrival of the Queen of Sheba' was one of its party pieces!'

This exhibit has a reference ID of CH43525. Please quote this reference ID in any communication with the Centre for Computing History.