Photos: IBM from Spitfires to Sphynxes

Big Blue's development lab at Hursley turns 50

By Julian Goldsmith, 19 September 2008 12:42

The IBM development laboratory at Hursley House celebrates its 50th birthday this month. Over the last half-century, the lab has seen many developments in storage and display created there.

The house and grounds have a history that dates back to Roman settlement, while its heritage as an engineering site precedes IBM's arrival.

During the 1940s, the house was given over to aerospace engineers at Vickers who used it to develop the Supermarine Spitfire fighter plane. What is now a conference hall on the ground floor was at that time used as a testing bay for Rolls Royce Merlin engines.

Photo credit: Julian Goldsmith/silicon.com

Comments

There are 3 comments. Join the discussion

  1. 1. Ralph

    Very interesting. A pic of the Winchester disc (or disk) drive would've been a must I'd have thought. IBM do, as they've got one on prominent display, in Hursley.

  2. 2. Richard

    Interesting place: In the 1970s, I was shown the large room full of disk drives: All together, these totalled... *several hundred Mega Bytes.*

  3. 3. Chris P

    The Gulliver 62GV is a "Winchester" technology drive. I don't recall adding any more disks to it. When I worked on the design there was a 5Mb version and a 10Mb version. When we were finished with that we went to work on the Piccolo drive which had 8" disks

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