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North section of BP House

The Univac 1006 was installed on the 1st floor of this part of BP House.

The building in the background was occupied by Robert McAlpine.

The Marlowes

Looking up The Marlowes with part of BP House spanning the road.

View shows The Waggon and Horses on the left.

BP House - old building

Originally known as Hempstead House, later known as BP House.

In the foreground - the water gardens and the circular car park. Looking down at the car park from above you went up clockwise and came down to the exit anti-clockwise. The bridge at the top which you drove across to make your way down was the source of many scraped cars!

Kodak building in rear of this picture.

The Waggon and Horse was to the left of this view.

Added by David F Thorn on 30 September 2011

BP House gardens

Gardens at the rear of the new building, constructed over the computer halls.

I can remember that before the gardens were laid the water proofing was tested by flooding this area making it in to a giant pond.

Added by David F Thorn on 30 September 2011

BP House underconstruction

£6M OVERHAUL FOR BREAKSPEAR PARK

Published on Wednesday 23 August 2006 in The Gazette
 
Giant office block Breakspear Park will be getting a £6 million revamp to put it on the business map.

The landmark building, at the gateway to Hemel Hempstead in Breakspear Way, has recently changed hands and the new owners plan an overhaul.

A new cafe will be built in the reception area, which will be moved to a more central and welcoming position.
Offices and common areas will get a facelift while the building's sign will get a new logo.

Business consultants Hewitt Associates and oil company BP are already tenants in the building while just over 100,000 sq ft of office space is up for grabs.

Graham Ricketts, of letting agents Brasier Harris, said they wanted to create a 'buzz' in the scheme.

"We are trying to appeal to local companies who might not associate themselves with the building at the moment," he said.

Added by David F Thorn on 29 September 2011

BP Going

Published on Tuesday 25 March 2003 in The Gazette

BP is leaving Hemel Hempstead it was announced today.

The company says it has taken the decision not to renew its lease on Breakspear Park, the prestige building just by the Hemel junction with the M1.

The move will involve about 750 people in all and most will be re-located to a purpose built business park at Sunbury on Thames.

The company does, however say that about 150 people will be based at a smaller operations centre elsewhere in the Hemel area.

At its peak in the 1990s, about 1,200 people worked at BP house, renamed Breakspear Park when the company scaled down its activities in the town.

The move, says BP, will be phased in from late 2003 and throughout 2004

The oil giant has been a big part of the town since the early 1970s when it occupied the office building that spanned the entrance to the town centre.

It moved to its current site in 1989 after the town centre building had to be closed and later demolished due to structural problems.

Added by David F Thorn on 29 September 2011

Univac Fastrand II - what a beast of a storage device?

The FASTRAND™ II

The FASTRAND II random-access mass storage system was one of the most impressive peripherals ever attached to a commercial computer. Used with the UNIVAC 1108 computer, it provided the first permanent file storage capability in the UNIVAC 1100 series family. 

No UNIVAC programmer who ever encountered a FASTRAND is likely to forget it. It was big, heavy (it weighed about two and a quarter tons, and required special reinforcement of the raised floor it sat on), had a large window lit by fluorescent lights which let you see the two huge drums rotating in opposite directions at 880 revolutions per minute and the heads jumping back and forth as various tracks were accessed. In operation, it emitted a deep rumble accompanied by a whoosh of air much like the engine room in Star Trek. Opening the door on the end revealed a complex control panel which included, at the top, a collection of “hit detectors” which told you if one of the read/write heads had contacted the drum surface.

FASTRAND II Specifications

Storage Capacity	22,020,096 36-bit words; 132,120,576 6-bit characters, or about 90 megabytes¹
Drum Speed	880 revolutions per minute
Read/write heads	64, on a movable boom between the two drums
Average access time	92 milliseconds
Transfer rate	26,283 36-bit words per second, about 100 kilobytes¹ per second
Recording density	1000 bits per inch
Track density	105 tracks per inch
Price (1968 dollars)	Controller: $41,680, Storage unit: $134,400 Maximum 8 storage units per controller

Twenty-eight

Another odd aspect of the FASTRAND was that it addressed data in blocks, or sectors of 28 36-bit words. Most storage peripherals on binary computers use a sector size which is a power of two, for example 32 or 256. If the sector size is a power of two, address computation, such as figuring out which sector to read and which word within it to access when presented with a word address in a file, can be done entirely by shifting and masking, which is almost always much faster than multiplying or dividing. For example, on the UNIVAC 1108, division took 10.125 microseconds, while a double-word shift of any number of bits required just 0.875 microseconds: eleven and a half times faster. 

Nobody ever seemed to know why the FASTRAND used 28 word sectors; the most common explanation was that the device had originally been designed to work with UNIVAC 490 series real-time computers with a word length of 30 bits and a FASTRAND sector size of 32. This may be the case, but the arithmetic doesn't quite work. If you take the number of bits corresponding to 28 36-bit words (1008), then divide by 30, you get a capacity of 33.6 30-bit words in the same sector. Why would they have wasted a word and a half in every sector? A device designed for 32 30-bit words would have a sector size of 26 36-bit words, with two-thirds of a word being wasted. Another purported explanation was that the FASTRAND had originally been designed for 32 word sectors, but wasn't reliable enough at the recording density that required, so the sector size was reduced to reduce bits per inch to a point where the hardware worked acceptably. 

Whatever the reason, the number 28 was never far from the mind of a UNIVAC systems programmer, since the EXEC-8 operating system made no attempt to sugar-coat the properties of the underlying hardware. When programming in assembly language, one allocated buffers as multiples of 28 words, calculated addresses by multiplying and dividing by 28 (one wag expressed surprise when the 1110 did not include special hardware for multiplying and dividing by 28), and since word-addressable drums were usually treated as high-speed FASTRAND emulators, the influence of 28 crept throughout the system, to the block sizes used on tape drives transferring data to and from the FASTRAND. 

Twenty-eight was referred to in jest as “von Fastrand's number”, after the (mythical) Baron Gustav von Fastrand, who it was said, discovered the number during a nineteenth-century expedition between the numbers 27 and 29. Even after the last FASTRAND had been long retired, its legacy, twenty-eight, lived on in UNIVAC 1100 Series software. Byte-oriented disc drive controllers had special hardware to repack 36-bit words efficiently into 8-bit bytes, and physical sector sizes, expressed in words, were always a multiple of 28.

Notes

1. Since the UNIVAC 1100 series machines to which the FASTRAND II was connected used 36-bit words rather than 8-bit bytes, it isn't possible to precisely compare the capacity of a device such as the FASTRAND II with contemporary byte-oriented disc drives. Calculating the total capacity in bits and dividing by 8 yields a total capacity of 99 megabytes, but since UNIVAC software in the FASTRAND era used 6-bit FIELDATA character codes (by the time ASCII came into wide use, most FASTRANDs had been retired in favour of a variety of disc drives), the capacity in terms of contemporary computer documents was 132 million characters. When UNIVAC adopted ASCII in the 1100 series, they stored 4 characters in the four 9-bit fields of each 36-bit word, so the capacity of a FASTRAND II in terms of ASCII characters would be 88 megabytes. The same considerations apply to calculations of the transfer rate.
2. The FASTRAND II was the second member of the FASTRAND family, and by far the most common. The ill-fated FASTRAND I had only one rotating drum and half the storage capacity. A single massive drum rotating almost 15 times a second acts as a powerful gyroscope which tries to stay in a fixed location with respect to the distant stars. Unfortunately, the Earth rotates, and this leads to a conflict between the Earthly imperative of motion and the FASTRAND I's desire to stay put, which resulted in the devices tending to move around the computer room. In the FASTRAND II, the two drums rotated in opposite directions, which cancelled out the gyroscopic effect. The story of the Navy ship which set sail with a spinning FASTRAND only to have it stand on end at the first course change is, as far as I can determine, apocryphal.
3. Around 1970, the FASTRAND III was introduced. It was physically identical to the FASTRAND II but increased the recording density to from 1000 to 1500 bits per inch, thereby increasing the storage capacity and transfer rate by 50%.
4. You could attach as many as 8 FASTRAND cabinets to each controller, and the controller could be connected to two separate I/O channels on the computer, allowing two simultaneous data transfers. In addition, each FASTRAND cabinet could position its read-write head boom independently, notifying the computer when it arrived, so all units could be seeking at the same time.

References

Sperry Rand Corporation, UNIVAC 1110 System Description, UP-7841, 1970.

FASTRAND is a trademark of Sperry Rand Corporation, since merged into Unisys Corporation

 The above article has been reproduced with the permission of the author John Walker of Fourmilab. 

Fastrand II's were used to provide some of the storage on the Univac machines in BP House in the 1970's. They were indeed absolutely massive. My calculations are that one of these provided about one-tenth of a GB of storage. The cost of a single Fastrand II in todays (2011) money would be about £750,000 - just image this the next time you use a 4GB USB stick or put an 16GB SDHC card in your digital camcorder! 


I can recall stories that the drums of the Fastrand II's were made from drainage/sewage pipes in the USA and filled with concrete before being given a coating and built into a "state of the art" device. 


I also recall it was said that if one was ever to come off its axis it would have enough momentum to exit the building through a window (whether open or not!) and travel to the end of The Marlowes (must have been at least half a mile).


Added by David F Thorn on 24 February 2011

Image courtesy of Computer History Museum

Photo of a Fastrand II more clearly showing the drum cylinders.


Added by David F Thorn on 27 February 2011

BP House, Breakspear Way - under construction

A work in progress - the new BP House, Breakspear Way under construction.

Thanks to Mike Bean for the submission of these photos.

Univac 1106 Console

Univac 1106 Console

A view of the Univac 1106 console and some of the tape decks.

Thanks to Mike Bean for the submission of this photo.

BP House Victoria Street - Computing

CPM (early DOS computer)

Tape and disk store

Victoria Street VAX Computer

Victoria Street VAX printer

Slightly off the topic of SMBP and BP Oil Hemel Hempstead but still of interest. Similar computing equipment was present in Hemel Hempstead, so these are good examples of what was in use there too.

The Head Office for BP Oil was in Victoria Street, London. 

Thanks to Mike Bean for the submission of these photos.

Computing at light speed

Computer operator Jim Burton with chief executive Ian Walker (right) and computer services manager John Cross.

Seven million pounds-worth of high tech­nology computer equipment was formally commissioned last week when Ian Walker, BP Oil's chief executive, visited the new com­puter room at BP House, Hemel Hempstead.

Not surprisingly, with so much sophisticated hard­ware carrying so much company information, security is a high priority. Entry for everyone - including Mr Walker - is via an inches thick rein­forced door which can only be opened by keying in a special code in conjunction with a special card.

Library

The room houses three main frame and three mini­computers, the com­munications equipment, and ancillary storage equip­ment. A fire-proofed library stores 15,000 magnetic tapes, of which up to 1000 will be used in any one day.

These tapes are now being superseded by 24 of the latest disc storage devices. While they look like old fashioned washing machines there is nothing dated about the ability of each one to store 90 mil­lion words - equivalent to, say, 500 paperbacks.

The communications side of the company has quintupled in the past four years as John Cross, BP Oil's computer services manager, explained to Mr Walker. Modern tech­nology is having difficulty in keeping pace with modern requirements. The various pieces of equip­ment have to be sited within 50 feet of each other simply because communication between them is slowed down by distance.

"A communications signal tracks one foot every one hundred thousandth of a second," Mr Cross said. "Light has actually become too slow for many modern processes."

Cabling

There is also the pro­blem of sheer size, espe­cially where cables are con­cerned. BP Oil is now using fibre optic cabling because one fibre optic can carry the equivalent of 250 con­ventional cables.

Computers too, are getting smaller. To use the jargon, they have a `decreasing footprint'. Mr Walker commented that the space taken up by the first computer at Hemel Hemp­stead, the Leo, was some one-and-a-half times that of the present Univac's. Whereas the Leo boxes held only 16,000 words of memory the Univac holds a million.

"Looking to the future," he said, "we have to bal­ance the unlimited demand from a population increasingly hungry for more and more instant information - which fre­quently cannot be other nice to know - with the rapid production of essential data and statements which lead to a more efficient and cost effective company."

Taken from BP Oil News - May 1983

£7m in 1983 would today (2010) be worth about £16.5m.

Today, it is quite amusing to read such comments about computer size becoming an issue and thereby the distance that information had to travel. Also, the comment from John Cross that “light is too slow” – I suppose that as we could not move data faster than light we just had to make the technology smaller.

The linear storage of data on tapes were only then being passed out for the non-linear discs.

Ian Walkers comment about the need for instant information, specific to the business and not just “nice to know” is somewhat prophetic for an age when we have almost unimaginable instant access to a wealth of information via personal computers and the internet.  

An interesting article from a time when major step changes in computing where taking place and giving an insight into the challenges of the future that we had to address.

Added by David F Thorn Tuesday 14 September 2010

Weighing it all up

Shed stones raise pounds. That was the idea that Hemel's Charlotte Harber (nee Withey, then wife of Martin Harber) and Gill Glover came up with when they suggested that their male colleagues start a sponsored slim. And after weighing in last month, the foursome notched up a total loss of 40.5 pounds and a gain of £57.50

"The money was raised for Befriending Parents," says Tony Smart, from central technical support at Hemel Hemptead. Tony sits on the steering committee for Befriending Parents, which was set up in November 1981 to give help and assistance to parents with handicapped children.

Hemel's Sister Pereira suggested a diet of 1,000 calories a day for the foursome and gave them helpful information about weight watching and sensible eating.

Keeping watch on the pounds, our picture shows Charlotte Harber, and from the left, Brian Spencer, Derek Morris, Tony Smart (on the scales) and Steve Emmett.

Missing from the picture is Tony's wife Maureen Smart and Pauline Bonfield, who also work at Hemel and who later joined in the sponsored slim to boost the funds.

Taken from BP Oil News - May 1983

The computing world's Webster

Richard Doyle knew what he was talking about when he was invited to speak at the British Computer Society Database Conference last month. It was a subject close to home - data dictionaries.

Richard, project leader in development control, was responsible for setting up the dictionary currently in use at Hemel Hempstead. “It’s sort of like a Webster’s of the computer world,” he says.

The data dictionary is used to store the definitions of all the company’s data, including how and where it’s used within our computer systems.

Richard spent a great deal of time working out in advance how the dictionary was going to be used. “It took eighteen months,” he says, “and it was important to get it right in the early stages because to go back and make changes would have been costly.”

The main benefit of this system is that it can help people fully understand the meaning and use of all the data that is processed.

"We're something of a pioneer in this market,” says Richard, “so I felt quite pleased when I was invited to discuss our experiences and uses of the dictionary at the conference.”

Richard also works as a consultant to other BP and outside companies, occasionally selling our data dictionary and interface programmes and earning the company money.

Taken from BP Oil News - May 1983

PC and printer gifted to RAF Northwood

The PC, CRT monitor and printer (no mouse?) shown in this picture was the height of computer technology in October 1987.

This hardware was donated by BP Oil and Boffin Computer Maintenance to the cadets at RAF Northwood. Possibly to naval cadets, as the photo I have has Commander-in-Chief Fleet on the reverse.

Boffin was the computer maintenance and support function of Pericom PLC (Chairman - Ron Cragg) based in Milton Keynes. They were major suppliers to BP Oil in the 1980's.

I recall seeing facilities onsite at RAF Northwood that were used as part of "Operation Corporate" (the 1982  Falklands War).

In the photo unknown, Yorath Trebble, David Thorn, Phil Else (Managing Director - Boffin Computer Maintenance), unknown, Ian Pitkethly and Laurence Hill.

BP Oil Computer and Accounting Centre

Computers are a people business.

The link above will take you to a pdf of a 20 page booklet called "Computers are a people business" which was published in 1980.

Warning : This is quite a large document at 353MB depending on your broadband (using a speed of 200 kB/sec it may take about 30 mins to download).

This booklet was designed to promote careers within the BP Oil Computer and Accounting Centre at Hemel Hempstead. Although this was available to staff at the time, I think it was focused towards the annual graduate intake (commonly known as "The Milk Round").

This was obviously a time of expansion and getting the "right young things" in to a "high-tech" career was perhaps difficult!
People mentioned in this booklet are Angela Slezok (she later married Richard Doyle), Jacky Dormer, Helen McGillicuddy and John Maher.

George's box room collection

George in his box-room with - what else - a collection of post boxes.

When people go to the Post Office to make a collection they usually come away with a letter or parcel. Hemel Communication Engineer George Kar­vounakis often ends up buying the post box itself.

He started his off-beat col­lections two years ago last month and currently he has a hefty selection of I00 toy miniatures and eight genuine ones.

The 'real' ones he buys from the Post Office at any­thing from £220 upwards for a pillar box, £60 for a wall box and about £45 for a lamp box.

The oldest one he has is a Victorian wall box he bought from a Post Office in Essex.

The boxes are usually in poor condition and George first has to deliver them to his garden shed for a face-lift. Once he has got them back to near original condition he deposits them in his spare bed­room with the rest of his col­lection.

"My wife thought I was mad at first," he says, "but she's got used to it now. I didn't realise there were so many different types of boxes until I started collecting them."

George writes to all the Post Office regional head­quarters asking to be put on their 'mailing lists' for post boxes.

The toy miniatures he finds in shops and on market stalls. "Sometimes I just jump in my car and go out pillar box hunting."

George, who also collects pictures of pillar boxes, went to his native Greece last year for a holiday and even managed to find a post box for his collection over there.

He is also a keen stamp collector but his number one hobby is post boxes. "With stamps you know exactly what you are looking for — it's all in the catalogue. But with post boxes you never know what is going to turn up," he says.

George still has plenty of space left in his spare bed­room to increase his collec­tion and so if any readers have a post box or a picture of a post box, he would be delighted to get a letter from them.

Taken from BP Oil News - January 1983

Befriending Parents

Tony Smart

Giving families of disabled folk a fair break...

Families in the Hemel area with handicapped children are being given a new lease of life thanks to a scheme called Befriending Parents. And BP Oil employees in the town are playing a major role in helping the scheme develop.

Last year they donated £1,000 to Befriending Parents and they have pledged to raise a similar amount each year. Says BP Oil's Tony Smart (above), who serves on the steering committee of Befriending Parents:

"We hope to raise the money through a series of raffles, competitions, bring and buy sales and the like. The cash is needed to meet the host of administrative costs associated with the scheme, everything from telephone calls and stationery to travel­ling expenses for the volun­teers who visit the families."

These volunteers are called `befrienders' and so far ten of them have been matched up with families who have a mentally or physically handi­capped child.

The aim is to act as friends and sympathisers to these parents who have more than their fair share of problems bringing up a family.

Organisers still do not have nearly as many volunteers as they would like and are anxious that people do not mistake the purpose of the scheme.

As a volunteer, no one is expected to cope with a handi­capped child. The role is a supportive one and volun­teers act as companions and sometimes someone to lean on for these busy parents.

The help provided might be an evening baby-sitting while the parents have a rare night out or a few hours driving people on hospital visits.

The co-ordinator of Befriending Parents is Barbara Bradley, herself the mother of an 11-year-old severely handicapped child.

Although he is a full-time job, he is not demanding or worrying, but he does get bored. This is why Barbara is often worried. "I feel guilty if I feel I am not stimulating his interest," she says.

This is where Barbara's own `befriender', Ann Hubball is such a godsend. Her presence enables Barbara to be able to relax and forget the responsibility for a time. Just to go off on her own for an hour or two, to go shopping or visit the hairdresser without worrying is a relief.

It also enables Barbara to get down to the business of linking volunteers with families.

"You don't need to be experienced or specialised to help in our scheme. It's commonsense that matters all the time," she says.

Befriending Parents was formed in November 1981 as a result of the International Year of Disabled People. It developed throughout 1982 and it is hoped that this year it will go from strength to strength.

The support given by BP Oil employees in Hemel is much appreciated but, of course, more support is always needed.

If you would like further details of the scheme, please contact Tony Smart in room 110 (extension 460).

Taken from BP Oil News - January 1983

Bowden Trophy - November 1982

Game for a Laugh...

There was fun and games at Hemel in November when all departments got together to compete for the Bowden Trophy.

The event, held annually since 1965, involves staff in games like passing the key on a piece of string through clothing, walking with balloons between legs and passing tennis balls to partners using only chins.

The trophy was won by Computer Operations, and for the first time in the history of the contest the winning team scored maximum points.

There were a lot of new faces taking part this time because of the transfers from Victoria which made the victory more impressive. The trophy was presented by Mike Hancock.

Taken from BP Oil News - January 1983