Organisational 1767 Foundation of Her Majesty's Nautical Almanac Office.
1921 The Radio Research Station (later the Appleton Laboratory) was founded in Slough.
1938 Government Code & Cypher School (GC&CS ) established at Bletchley Park (later GCHQ).
1957 National Institute for Research in Nuclear Science (NIRNS) set up.
1958 The 600 MeV proton linear accelerator was transferred from the UKAERE Harwell to create the Rutherford High Energy Laboratory (RHEL) as a NIRNS establishment.
1962 The Daresbury Laboratory opened as a NIRNS establishment.
1964 The Atlas Computing Laboratory was established on the Harwell campus to support UK university research in the sciences, social sciences and humanities. Staff were drawn from GC&CS and UKAERE Harwell.
1965 The Science Research Council (SRC, in 1981 to become SERC) was created and took responsibility for the two NIRNS establishments, the Appleton Laboratory and the Royal Observatories at Greenwich and Edinburgh.
1967 The Chilbolton Observatory with its 25 metre radar antenna (which is still the world’s largest fully steerable antenna) was opened by the SRC.
1975 The Atlas Computing Laboratory was renamed the Atlas Centre and merged with the Rutherford Laboratory.
1975 The Appleton Laboratory relocated from Slough to the Harwell campus and merged with the Rutherford Laboratory to form the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.
1994 UKERNA was spun-out as a private company from the RAL network group to operate the UK’s education and research network JANET.
1995 The UK Research Councils were restructured. The CCLRC was formed to operate the Daresbury, and Rutherford Appleton Laboratories, and Chilbolton Observatory.
1998 Her Majesty's Nautical Almanac Office moved from the Royal Greenwich Observatory to RAL. 2007 CCLRC merged with PPARC to form the STFC to operate the laboratories. Processing 1949 Harwell Dekatron Computer designed. 1955 Harwell CADET operates as first fully transistorised computer. 1958 Ferranti Mercury computer installed at Harwell. 1962 RHEL installed Ferranti Orion computer.
1964 Atlas Computing Laboratory installs the world’s most powerful computer - the Ferranti Atlas.
1966 Daresbury Laboratory installs a IBM 360/50.
1971 RHEL install an IBM 360/195 for £2.5 million, providing 30 MIPS.
1978 The first Cray-1 super-computer in the UK is installed temporarily at the Daresbury Laboratory – providing 147 Mflop.
|  | 1987 A Cray X-MP was brought into service at RAL – providing 1 Gflop.
1992 A Cray Y-MP replaces the Cray X-MP - 2.5 Gflops.
2002 HPCx starts operation at the Daresbury laboratory as Europe’s most powerful academic computer - running at 3.2 Tflop. Networking & Distributed Computing 1972 Twelve private data lines for remote computer access were linked to RHEL from UK universities and CERN.
1973 The IBM 360/195 at RHEL became the first machine outside the USA to connect to the ARPAnet. It was also the most powerful machine on the ARPAnet at the time. The connection was made through UCL, via Norway to the USA.
1975 SRCnet was established to link the IBM at Rutherford with the IBM at Daresbury and the ICL 1906A on the Atlas site.
1984 SRCnet is extended to become the first UK national computing network – JANET.
1992 JANET becomes the highest performance X.25 network in the world.
1992 RAL installs one of the first 50 web servers in the world.
2004 The National Grid Service (NGS) becomes the first operational national production grid service in the world.
2006 RAL Tier-1 computing service sustains 200 Mbyte/s data transfer with CERN to break world record. Storage 1981 A mass storage facility is introduced at RAL – 110GB.
1998 Usage of RAL mass storage exceeds enough to transfer the names of everybody on the planet each day.
2005 The Science and Technology Facilities Council e-pubs repository is the largest open access publications archive in the UK.
2006 Atlas Petabyte Datastore provides 5 Petabytes of storage. Graphics & Interaction 1968 Atlas staff produce the first commercially distributed computer animated film. 1979 Academy Award for Special Effects to Ridley Scott's Alien - the wire frame computer graphics were created at RAL.
1981 ICL launch Perq - the first commercial graphics workstation, running software developed at RAL.
1982 Animated Channel 4 TV logo designed at RAL.
1998 Science and Technology Facilities Council staff design the W3C recommendation SMIL which becomes the basis for MMS used in mobile phones. |
