Whitechapel Computer Works

~ the goodbye ~

Whitechapel Computer Works Ltd was founded in April 1983 by Timothy Eccles and Bob Newman, in the East End of London, inside a council-funded high-technology hub called the Whitechapel Technology Centre. The money was about a million pounds and the list of who supplied it is the interesting part. The Greater London Enterprise Board put in £100,000 to start and the Department of Trade and Industry came in alongside it, with two private backers, Newmarket and Baillie Gifford, making up the rest. Design work on the first machine began that August and the first units shipped in September 1984.

The machine was the MG-1, and the name is short for Milliard Gargantubrain, which is a computer in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It ran Unix on a National Semiconductor 32016 at 8 MHz, with a proper memory management unit and 512 KB of RAM that went to eight megabytes. The display was 1024 by 800 and monochrome. Disks ran from 10 to 45 MB and Ethernet cost extra. It started at £5,495, which the company advertised as the first ten-thousand-dollar personal workstation, and it was pitched as doing the work of a Hewlett-Packard 9000 at a more competitive price.

Getting there meant borrowing from the wrong industry. Sun and Apollo built workstations the way minicomputer companies built minicomputers, on backplanes full of boards. Whitechapel used a single eight-layer system board holding the processor and almost everything else, which is how personal computers were made, and that is where the price came from. It worked well enough that something like a thousand of the first-range machines went out, and they did unusually well in the City of London, where the financial firms wanted screens that could display a lot of numbers at once.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the machine ~

National Semiconductor supplied the operating system as well as the processor, in the form of Genix, which was Unix System III with pieces of 4.1BSD added. During 1985 Whitechapel threw it out and replaced it with its own 4.2BSD port, called 42nix, running a graphical environment named Oriel. Oriel sat partly inside the kernel, with the screen driver managing window regions called panels and refreshing them from raster images prepared elsewhere in memory. The company reported a sixfold graphics improvement from the change.

Two details from that work are worth keeping. The mouse had its own dedicated processor, which also watched the keyboard, specifically so that pointer movement would not wait behind whatever Unix was doing. And the pointer itself was drawn in hardware from a 64-pixel buffer composited over the main image, which is the same trick a sprite does on a games machine. The MG-1 also had a soft power switch that started an orderly Unix shutdown instead of cutting the supply, a feature it shared with the Apple Lisa and the slightly later Torch Triple X.

The industrial design went to a firm called Fether & Partners, on the reasoning that a machine costing £5,495 had to look like it, and what they produced was a two-tier box resembling stacked hi-fi separates with the monitor as its own unit. The buyers turned out to be universities and chip designers rather than the CAD market the thing had been aimed at. The City University installed 140 MG-1s, the largest single deployment anywhere. European Silicon Structures ran its SOLO design suite on them and Lattice Logic ran Chipsmith.

~ the decline ~

The memory management unit had bugs, documented as early as 1985, and sat on a board of its own carrying the hardware fixes. There was no distributor in the United States at all, so the American market was handled from 1984 to 1986 by a company called Cybertool Systems, and the largest workstation market in the world was therefore reached through one reseller. A color model, the CG-1, was announced in 1986, and the faster MG-200 followed in March 1987. By then the company that had designed the MG-1 no longer existed: Whitechapel Computer Works went into receivership during 1986.

~ the second death ~

It came back almost immediately as Whitechapel Workstations Ltd, with the management rebuilt from half the old staff and half new, and it did something genuinely remarkable on the way out. It abandoned National Semiconductor for MIPS, and in 1987 it shipped the first MIPS-based desktop computers in the world: the Hitech-10 on an R2000 and then the Hitech-20 on an R3000, running MIPS's own Unix and sold for computer animation work. The plan was to move manufacturing to West Germany and sell into America through resellers. In April 1988 it went into receivership for the second time.

In June 1988 a consortium called Computer Hitech International bought the Hitech-10 assets and renamed itself Mistral Computer Systems, then subcontracted the design work to Algorithmics Ltd, which one account describes as essentially the rump of the old Whitechapel design team. Mistral shipped a 25 MHz Mistral-20 in late 1989 and announced an R4000 machine that never appeared. Its assets were absorbed into a business that resold Hewlett-Packard and Sun. Algorithmics lasted another thirteen years on its own and was bought by MIPS Technologies in 2002. A British company running on a million pounds of public money shipped the world's first MIPS desktop, and it needed two receiverships to get there.

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