notes.husk.org/likes images.

Vauxhall, Julie Driscoll, The Angry Brigade and Mr Archer « Another Nickel In The Machine

The bomb at Tintagel house (a Metropolitan Police office block), just down from Vauxhall Bridge and a couple of buildings away from where is now the rather over-the-top MI6 building (officially known just as 85 Vauxhall Cross), was aimed at the police computer – a ‘state of the art’ UK designed ICT 1301 mainframe. As usual the explosion caused minimal damage and even though the computer was size of a house it seemingly could do nothing but add two and two together anyway.

The computer in question was completely British and was built jointly by GEC Telephones of Coventry and the British Tabulating Machine company who held all the rights to IBM technology throughout the British commonwealth. However, and with hindsight not exactly sensibly, they decided to give up these rights and build the 1301 in competition with IBM – then the Microsoft (sort of) of the day. The biggest selling point of the ICT 1301 was that it could add and subtract pounds shillings and pence, and to be able to multiply sterling amounts by decimal numbers.

The computer was about 20 ft wide and 22 ft long, weighed five tons, and had an internal memory of about 72 kilobytes (a Word document a few pages long). Each of the Ampex 1″ tape units in the background on the right could store about 9 megabytes of memory (about a couple of mp3s).

A few months after the Tintagel House bombing the police raided a house in Stoke Newington finding various explosives, ammunition and guns but most damning of all a John Bull printing kit. Gradually eight supposed members of The Angry Brigade were arrested, subsequently becoming known, rather imaginatively by the press, as the ‘Stoke Newington Eight’.