About Ferranti

Ferranti or Ferranti International plc was a major UK electrical engineering and equipment firm known primarily for defense electronics and power grid systems. The company was once a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index but ceased trading in 1993.

Ferranti is also famous in the computer industry for building the first commercially available computer, the Ferranti Mark 1, which was first delivered in 1951 and started their computer business, which lasted into the 1970s. They had influential collaborations with the university computing departments at Manchester and Cambridge, which resulted in the development of the Mercury and Atlas machines (Manchester); and the Atlas 2 or Titan (Cambridge).

In the late 1940s Ferranti joined with various university-based research groups to develop computers. Their first effort was the Ferranti Mark 1, completed in 1951, about nine delivered between 1951 and 1957. The Pegasus introduced in 1956 was their most popular valve (vacuum tube) system, with 38 units sold. In about 1956 Ivan Idelson of Ferranti originated the Cluff-Foster-Idelson coding of characters on 7-track paper tape for a BSI committee, which eventually became ASCII.

In collaboration with the University of Manchester they built a new version of the Mark 1 that replaced valve diodes with solid state versions, which allowed the speed to be increased dramatically as well as increasing reliability] Ferranti offered the result commercially as the Mercury starting in 1957, and eventually sold nineteen in total. Although a small part of Ferranti's empire, the computer division was nevertheless highly visible and operated out of a former steam locomotive factory in West Gorton.

Work on a completely new design, the Atlas, started soon after the delivery of the Mercury, aiming to dramatically improve performance. The machine first ran in 1962, and Ferranti eventually built three machines in total. A version of the Atlas modified for the needs of the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory led to the Titan (or Atlas 2), which was the mainstay of scientific computing in Cambridge for nearly 8 years.

By the early 1960s their mid-size machines were no longer competitive, but efforts to design a replacement were bogged down. Into this void stepped the Canadian division, Ferranti-Packard, who had used several of the ideas under development in England to very quickly produce the Ferranti-Packard 6000. By this time Ferranti's management had tired of the market and were looking for someone to buy the entire division. Eventually it was merged into International Computers and Tabulators (ICT) in 1963, becoming the Large Systems Division of ICL in 1968. After studying several options, ICT selected the FP6000 as the basis for their ICT 1900 line which sold into the 1970s

The deal setting up ICT excluded Ferranti from the commercial sector of computing, but left the industrial field free. Some of the technology of the FP 6000 was later used in its Ferranti Argus range of industrial computers which were developed in its Wythenshawe factory. The first of these, simply Argus, was initially developed for military use.

Meanwhile in Bracknell the Digital Systems Division was developing a range of mainframe computers for naval applications. Early computers using discrete transistors were the Hermes and Poseidon and these were followed by the F1600 in the mid-1960s. Some of these machines remained in active service on naval vessels for many years.The FM1600B was the first of the range to use integrated circuits and was used in many naval and commercial applications. The FM1600D was a single-rack version of the computer for smaller systems. An airborne version of this was also made and used aboard the RAF Nimrod. The FM1600E was a redesigned and updated version of the FM1600B, and the last in the series was the F2420, an upgraded FM1600E, in service at sea with the Royal Navy until 2010.