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Information Technology and BRC

Information Technology has always been at the heart of BRC's role, but in 1964 digital computing was still in its infancy. Computers were rare, costly, large in size and small in capacity. A full time Data Manager, Diana Scott, was recruited in 1969, and in 1970 the first direct line to a computer at Cambridge was installed. Nevertheless, BRC stayed with mechanical data processing ( punched cards and punched tape) for much of its work until the mid-1970s. Maps were produced directly from punched cards until 1978. Although Monks Wood acquired its first computer in 1974, its capacity was too small to handle BRC datasets efficiently. It was 'the size of a large wardrobe with the memory capacity of a pocket calculator'. On hot days it overheated and had to be shut down; in midsummer, invasions of thrips made it crash; and in cold weather it was temperamental.

In 1978, computing capacity able to accommodate datasets the size of BRC's (then about 2 million) records was made available on the Science Research Council's IBM 360/195 at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. A workstation to the IBM was installed at BRC in 1979. This was the second time that the main BRC database had migrated. A third move took place in 1989, when the database transferred to the ORACLE database management system, hosted at British Geological Survey's Keyworth site. During the 1990s, the database was moved back to Monks Wood. Computers became progressively smaller but more powerful. Although the Monks Wood hardware was upgraded many times and new versions of ORACLE were installed, the database during the period 1990-2004 was remarkably stable.