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MRC ENGINEERING 1 |
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THE FIRST MRC COURSE The first MRC Training course commenced in October 1966 at Featherstone Street Training School. It was led by John Hidden and various Dutch design engineers were drafted in to describe how their bits of equipment worked. The British PO had a required different design functions for the MRC and Phillips had devised the "ES" design as a development of their "MS" system. The engineers on the first course were: Maurice Jenkins (who would be repeating the training for furture MRC staff). Ken Quinn, Michael Clark, Peter Gardner, Jeff Clarke, Michael Pearce, John Filby, Robin Greaves (who left to join SITA after the training), Norman O'Gilvy, Shavak Madon, Paul Wells and David Rothan. The following photograph shows Jeff Clarke, David Rothan, Ken Quinn and Paul Wells on the visit to Holland made half way through the course. |
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CARDINAL HOUSE This is Jeff Clarke posing in front of an equipment rack at the request of the MEL contractors. MEL handled the UK installation of the MRC for the Manufacturer Philips Telecommunications Industry PTI. From the photograph the frames of relays were enclosed in racks with glass fronted doors. Later when it was realized how dirty the environment could be, all those working in the apparatus room had to wear protective clothing. This despite air conditioning. The windows in the background of this picture looked out onto Farringdon Road. |
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This second picture is of Shavak Madon, his pen is pointing out the core memory stack of an incoming message store (ECRTU), this held 2000 5 unit characters of an incoming telegram. To the right of the core stack are the electronic units which controlled the read write operation of the core memory. |
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The third picture below shows Paul (PMJ) Wells posing with an Intermediate Store (MBO). These stores used magnetic tape to store telegrams that could not immediately be routed to their outgoing destination for any reason such as congestion or circuit fault. They were also used on ARQ radio routes when character by character pulse release was necessary. |
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Another one of Jeff Clarke this time with an Intermediate Store |
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The following pictures below were provided by Ian Spencer and show the equipment practice employed in the MRC. The first showing an electronic plug-in assembly, wire ended components soldered to horizontal printed cards. The second a plug in relay assembly. |
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