Atlas & my mother’s new fridge

For some reason I thought that the Atlas supercomputer of the 1960s had been analogue rather than digital; I think I must have been muddling up & misremembering various discussions I had at that time with my father. He was very keen on the idea of analogue computers, & on Atlas too.

Some time after 1966 he decided to build his own home computer. I never had the privilege of seeing this machine, as I lived abroad at the time, & they left it behind when they moved to a new house. And since my father never wrote me a letter I have only my mother’s description to go on; it had a lot of valves & its main purpose seemed to be to switch lights on & off.

Mother was pleased about it for several reasons however – not least because she got a brand new modern fridge out of it.

My parents never lost the habits of thrift – little was ever bought new & we had a man in only rarely – both were good at DIY so things were bought second hand & refurbished or even made from scratch – a great advantage of having an engineer in the house.

The post-war prefab that was our first family home had a fitted kitchen with, wonder of wonders, a built-in refrigerator, but the Edwardian house we moved to when I was 8 had a proper pantry/larder, rendering a refrigerator unnecessary. Even better it doubled as a photographic dark room.

But the 1930’s house which came next had only the simplest ventilated cupboard. The refrigeration problem was solved by the purchase of an old fashioned model at auction. It was huge, though the internal space for storage was no greater than you would get in the smallest under-the counter fridge in a modern galley kitchen. Its deceptive size was made up mainly of insulation – which is what made it perfect housing for my father’s computer.

So, with children off their hands, they could afford to splash out.

Links

The ATLAS Computer:- The Technology
Overview Atlas Computer
Atlas Computer Laboratory
London Atlas
Archive - Desmond Paul Henry
Online Stuff - Science Museum