Hedsor Park And The Origins Of The British Computing Industry
A Memory of Hedsor.
By the late 1960's ICL had absorbed much of the country's computer industry and had several manufacturing centres at Manchester, Stoke-on-Trent and Letchworth. It needed a base for running training courses nearer to its research and development centres around Berkshire - what was to be known later as the UK's "silicon valley".
The site it acquired in 1969 was Hedsor Park, a superb Palladian house set in more than 80 acres of grounds. I was fortunate to be seconded here by my employers at the time to attend a computer programming course. Looking back now I realise that the computer facilities were painfully slow but at the time of my training in October 1970 this was the very latest in white hot technology! The slow processors of their main frame computers could not compete with a palm top computer in 2012!
My enduring memory of the beautiful Hedsor House is the wonderful grounds containing a pitch and put golf course, a long tree lined drive from the road to the house and a very long walk to the nearest pub along the main road.
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