I used to work as a test engineer in the ICL plant in Kidsgrove where these machines were made. I automated the test suite by utilising the 25th line of the screen which you could both write to and read from. This enabled the machine to know where it was up to after a reboot say after formatting the Hard Disc. This greatly reduced the number of manual interventions required to test the machine and earned me an award from the ICL Suggestion Awards Scheme.

I have the icl model 31 but it doesn''t work I was hoping someone would be able to help. It''s been in a attic for a long time got it down to try it all iy dose is show ":" on the screen. It did power up once and had some righting then "A: " But froze and touching keyboard did nothing but beep. I put an ms dos fopy in nothing happened.

In about 1982, I was working in the Magnetic Tape Group, part of “Peripheral Product Engineering” in ICL Kidsgrove. The department received a “Robbogram”, demanding a £100 terminal for this machine. Robbograms were terse messages from Rob Wilmott, so rather like a command from God! Somehow this requirement ended up with George Fitzgerald, my manager, and it ended up in my lap. I had NO idea about terminals, keyboards, RS232 etc, so it was a steep learning curve. I first played with an ADM3A terminal, a very basic machine, almost a glass teletype, Not really up to the job, and costing well over £200. Fortunately someone in our commercial department contacted Nissei Sangyo, who represented (amongst many other manufacturers) Kokusai Electric, a terminal manufacturer based not far from Tokyo. They were developing a new range of terminals, and we had 3 prototypes, KDS7361, KDS7362 and KDS7363. KDS7362 had the right balance of features, and we validated it using a Rair Black Box. When ICL wanted to launch the Personal Computer, the tooling wasn’t ready for injection moulded cases, George Fitzgerald and I persuaded Kokusai to make 250 machines with vacuum moulded cases. They weren’t happy, but George could be very persuasive. Real typists found that the 2-key lockout keyboard slowed them down, and some Wordstar issues led to a “release 2” product, with n-key rollover keyboard and a specific Wordstar mode which prevented characters disappearing if you typed too fast. I got two (exhausting) trips to Japan out of this project. I remember bringing a release 2 product back as hand luggage, only to find at Heathrow I couldn’t raise the import duty, and had to phone a friend! It was a very successful product, an OEM sales group selling it was formed, and later colour terminals were introduced, but by this time I was back in my comfort zone, introducing 1/4 inch and 1/2 inch cartridge tape drives. Jim Hancock