RIP Raymond Bird, designer of early mass-produced computer

Obit Raymond Bird, who developed the UK’s first mass-produced business computer, the Hollerith Electronic Computer (HEC), has died at the digitally apropos age of 101.

The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) announced Bird’s passing. A museum spokesperson, who was not immediately available to provide further details, told The Register family members had conveyed the news.

Prototyped near the end of 1951 but not publicly demonstrated until 1953, the HEC1, Bird explained in a 2011 video interview, “was the first electronic computer that was used for commercial purposes [in the UK] other than the LEO machine,” referring to the Lyons Electronic Office, which debuted in 1951.

Bird said Andrew Booth, a lecturer at Birkbeck College, London University, at the time, needed computers for crystallographic calculations and was designing one in a barn in Fenny Compton, Warwickshire.

Booth struck a deal with Bird’s employer, the British Tabulating Machine Company (BTM), to trade his Automatic Purpose Electronic Computer (APEC) design for punch-card machinery, which he needed to handle input and output.

So Bird, a former technical officer with the Royal Air Force, was dispatched by BTM, along with two colleagues, to record the APEC design on paper – the circuits and layouts of the boards – so the machine could be reproduced at BTM.

“Previously I had only worked with analog technologies and I was mesmerized by seeing this digital door opening before me,” he recounted, according to TNMOC. “It was my job to get something working. I did the things that Booth thought were trivial – I engineered it!”

BTM was formed in 1902 under the name The Tabulator Ltd to sell tabulating machines based on patented designs from Herman Hollerith, licensed from the US Tabulating Machine Company, subsequently merged into IBM. The BTM name came in 1907.

During World War II, BTM made the Bombe machines used to help crack the German Enigma cipher machines; its exclusive distribution deal with IBM ended in 1948.

Bird’s HEC design for BTM, completed in late 1951, six months before Booth’s APEC, included extra I/O interfaces for punch card equipment. A subsequent iteration, the HEC 2M design, became the first commercial version in 1955.

When we say the HEC series was mass produced, it’s relatively speaking for the era. In an edited transcription of a presentation at the Punched Card Reunion in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, in 1998, Bird explained, “We delivered about seven or eight HEC 2M systems. Customers included GE Research Laboratories (Graham Morris sold that one), Thorn, Esso, Boscombe Down, ARA and RAE, Bedford (they had two for wind tunnel applications) and the Indian Mathematical Institute. We believe that one was whisked off to the Soviet Union – we certainly never saw it again.”

In 1959, BTM merged with Powers-Samas under the name International Computers and Tabulators (ICT), whereupon the HEC 4 was renamed the ICT 1201.

Bird also designed the ICT 1301 family of computers, which were sold in the 1960s. A virtual version has been made available online.

The first iteration of the HEC, which used a magnetic drum storage system designed [PDF] by Booth, can be seen at the TNMOC alongside the 1949 EDSAC computer and the original 1951 Harwell Dekatron / WITCH computer.

Some of Bird’s technical work can be seen in his 1961 US Patent 2970765A for a “data translating apparatus.”

As he described the intellectual property situation back then during his 1998 presentation …

… it sounds like things haven’t changed much. ®

PS: If you’re into early digital computers, Usagi Electric recently got a Bendix G-15 vacuum-tube system running code from punched-tape to play music. The 1956-era computer’s roots can in part be traced back to Alan Turing, who conceived Britain’s Bombe.