Whitechapel Computer Works

Whitechapel Computer Works Ltd. (WCW) was a computer workstation company founded in the East End of London, United Kingdom in April 1983 by Timothy Eccles and Bob Newman, with a combined investment of £1 million from the Greater London Enterprise Board (£100,000 initially[1]), venture capital companies Newmarket and Baillie Gifford,[2] and the Department of Trade and Industry. The company was situated in the Whitechapel Technology Centre - a council-funded high-technology enterprise hub - and began the design of their first workstation model in August 1983, shipping the first units by September 1984.[3]

Logo for Whitechapel Computer Works Ltd (WCW).

MG-1 Workstation

The company's first workstation model was the MG-1 (named after the Milliard Gargantubrain from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy[4]). The MG-1 was based on the National Semiconductor NS32016 microprocessor, with 512 KB of RAM (expandable to 8 MB[3]), a 1024 × 800 pixel monochrome display, a 10, 22 or 45 MB hard disk, 800 KB floppy drive, and an optional Ethernet interface, with prices stated as being equivalent to $6975 for the 10 MB hard disk system, $8250 for the 22 MB system and $9500 for the 45 MB system.[5]

A contemporary evaluation of a 40 MB hard disk system with 2 MB RAM lists an approximate acquisition price of £9000.[4] While there was no distributor in the United States, the MG-1 was sold in North America by Cybertool Systems Ltd. from 1984 through 1986. A colour version, the CG-1, was also announced in 1986,[4] followed by the MG-200, with an NS32332 processor, in 1987.

The MG-1 employed an 8 MHz 32016 CPU with 32082 memory management unit (MMU) and 32081 floating-point unit (FPU), with the MMU being noted in a 1985 article as "suffering from bugs" and being situated on its own board providing hardware fixes. In order to deliver the machine at prices closer to personal computers than contemporary workstations (such as Sun, Apollo and Perq), design techniques from the personal computer industry were adopted, with a single eight-layer system board being used to hold the CPU and other integrated circuits.[3]

Initially, NatSemi's Genix operating system, described as being based on Unix System III with 4.1BSD enhancements,[6] or just 4.1BSD,[7] was provided. NatSemi's Unix roadmap in 1984 advertised forthcoming 4.2BSD features and a "generic port of UNIX System V".[8] However, during 1985, Genix was replaced on the MG-1 by a port of 4.2BSD called 42nix and augmented with the Oriel graphical user interface to give a reported factor of six performance improvement in graphics performance,[4] Oriel being partially kernel-based.[7]

In order to improve responsiveness and reduce the latency observed with contemporary Unix systems, the mouse position was tracked using a dedicated processor which also monitored the keyboard for events, and a form of hardware mouse pointer was used, with the pointer bitmap being stored in its own 64-pixel buffer as a kind of overlay, this being combined with the main display image to produce the final screen image.[3]

History and Legacy

WCW went into receivership in 1986, but were soon revived, as Whitechapel Workstations Ltd., only to go into liquidation in April 1988. The new company, described as "a briefly flowering UK-based UNIX workstation company that shipped the first MIPS desktop computers in 1987",[9] launched the Hitech-10 and Hitech-20 workstations with R2000 and R3000 MIPS architecture processors respectively. These ran the UMIPS variant of UNIX, with either X11 or NeWS-based GUIs, and were aimed at computer animation applications.

Some ex-Whitechapel engineers went on to form Algorithmics Ltd., specialising in MIPS-based embedded systems. Algorithmics was later acquired by MIPS Technologies in 2002.[10] The rights to the Hitech workstations were acquired by Mistral Computer Systems Ltd. in June 1988.

References
  1. Large, Peter (14 September 1984). "Silicon Alley goes posh". The Guardian. Retrieved 19 December 2020.
  2. Eustace, Peter (13 September 1984). "UK firm enters workstation fray". The Engineer. Retrieved 19 December 2020.
  3. Pountain, Dick (February 1985). "Realizing a Dream". Byte UK. pp. 379–382, 384. Retrieved 18 December 2020.
  4. Robinson, K. (June 1986). "Evaluation of Single User Systems". Computing at Chilton: 1961-2003. Retrieved 2008-04-17.
  5. "Whitechapel Workstation Displays 1024 by 800 Pixels". Byte. January 1985. p. 42. Retrieved 18 December 2020.
  6. MG-1 The Personal Workstation. Whitechapel Computer Works. p. 4. Retrieved 21 December 2020.
  7. Sweetman, Dominic (1985). "A Modular Window System for Unix". Computing at Chilton: 1961-2003 (first published in: Methodology of Window Management, Hopgood et al., Springer, 1986). Retrieved 2008-04-17.
  8. "Genix is here. Now". UNIX Review. April 1984. pp. 62–63. Retrieved 7 January 2021.
  9. Sweetman, Dominic. See MIPS Run (2 ed.). Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. p. 475. ISBN 978-0-12-088421-6.
  10. "MIPS Technologies Acquires Leading GNU Tool Chain Company, UK-Based Algorithmics". Design And Reuse. Retrieved 2021-01-21.
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