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