ICL Series 39 Computer Launch 1985

From the days when computer launches were big affairs - sometimes to live audiences of several thousand people. This is a video which was sent to customers who could not attend one of the many Series 39 launch events (a break-through range of mainframes launched by ICL in 1985).

At the time, UK-based ICL was one of Europe's largest computer companies (along with Siemens Nixdorf, Bull, and Olivetti), and a leader in the Open Systems movement. Series 39 was developed at West Gorton in Manchester, a facility of 1200 people who included several who had worked alongside Alan Turing on the world's first computers at the University of Manchester: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manches...
http://curation.cs.manchester.ac.uk/c...

ICL Series 39 and its VME operating system (Virtual Machine Environment) were in many ways ahead of their time. It incorporated advanced Virtualization techniques which would not be seen on other systems for many years, and incorporated an early form of massively parallel computer in the form of it's CAFS subsystem.

The video is a reminder of just how different the world was 30-odd years ago. The numbers of customers mentioned may seem tiny, but each was a major corporation (the only ones who could afford large mainframe systems back then). What we think of as PCs are referred to as "microprocessors" (the IBM PC was launched only 4 years earlier, and the Apple Mac the year before Series 39). And of course, the speaker's accents are in impeccable BBC tones.

The video is long, and the presentation style might seem mystifying to today's audience. It is actually an attempt to re-create what was seen by live audiences at the very large-scale launch events held around the UK (with several thousand people in the audience at some venues!). The video segments are what was shown in the auditorium and the presenter is following the same script that the live presenters used during what really was an audio-visual spectacular! You have to imagine you are in a darkened auditorium with a thousand or so people, a booming audio system, huge screen, dry ice, celebrity presenters and quite an atmosphere of expectation. (The business equivalent of a rock concert really!)

Apologies for the poor quality - this has been transferred to digital format off a 30 year old VHS tape.