X-Nico

unusual facts about Plessey/GPT



Ambergate

It was installed by Plessey and the first of many TXE2 type exchanges.

British Approvals Board for Telecommunications

At that point in history, British Telecom was a state monopoly, and even by 1982 BT only allowed (via approval) the four British manufacturers (STC, GEC, Plessey, and Thorn-Ericsson) to supply its twenty five types of phone through them, and not independently.

Coral 66

A variant of Coral 66 was developed during the late 1970s/early 1980s by the British GPO, in conjunction with GEC, STC and Plessey, for use on the System X digital telephone exchange control computers, known as PO-CORAL.

Digital Private Network Signalling System

DPNSS was an active (and successful) collaboration between PBX manufacturers and BT which started relatively slowly (BT & Plessey) but quickly snowballed with MITEL, GEC, Ericsson, Philips and eventually Nortel all joining to create a powerful and feature rich protocol.

GEC Plessey Telecommunications

During the mid-1990s, the name GPT gradually disappeared in the UK; and by October 1997 the joint venture, through a series of Siemens mergers and acquisitions in UK, evolved into 'Siemens GEC Communication Systems' (SGCS), which later in 1998 merged to Siemens Business Communication Systems (SBCS) to form the largest division of Siemens AG - Siemens Communications.

IBM System/38

(The earlier Plessey 250 was one of the few other computers with capability architecture ever sold commercially).

J. Samuel White's Ground

When first acquired, the clubs membership was only open to employees and ex-employees of Plessey's and J. Samuel White & Co.

John Allen Clark

In 1988 GEC announced a new partnership with the German electronics group Siemens to once again bid for Plessey.

In 1971 Clark succeeded Field Marshal Lord Harding as chairman of Plessey.

Plessey

Plessey was also the lead contractor for the Ptarmigan communications system supplied to the British Army that adopted the Plessey System 250 architecture.

After the sale of the Roborough site in Plymouth to Xfab, the original Plessey Semiconductors site at Cheney Manor, Swindon continued to operate under the Zarlink Semiconductor name until it was sold to MHS Industries in early 2008.

By 1972 Plessey designed the first industrial Capability-based security computer, a fault-tolerant multiprocessor system called Plessey System 250.

PMBR

-- I disagree with the capitalization of "Partition Table" so this may need adjustment at some later time --> Because the GPT scheme stores a copy of the table not only at logical block address (LBA) 1 but also on the last sectors of the disk the one at LBA 1 would be the primary.

PROC procedure language

A number of large scale manufacturing applications were developed in RPL, including that which was in use at Plessey/GPT limited in Liverpool and also the Trifid suite of manufacturing software.

RAF Trimingham

In May 1996 the Marconi Type 91 'Martello' radar at Trimingham was sold to the Turkish Ministry of Defence and it was replaced by what used to be known as No 86 Signals Unit, with a Type 93 (Plessey type ADGE-305, NATO designation TGRI 50011) that had been moved from Hopton when that base was closed.

Real-time Programming Language

A number of large scale manufacturing applications were developed in RPL, including that which was in use at Plessey and GEC-Plessey Telecommunications limited in Liverpool and also the Trifid suite of manufacturing software.

SAMPSON

MESAR 1 development commenced in 1982 as a partnership between Plessey, Roke Manor Research and the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency.

TXK

The development of electronic systems however took longer than anticipated and the British equipment manufacturers, particularly Automatic Telephone & Electric (ATE), which later became part of the Plessey group feared that continuing to focus the bulk of their production on Strowger equipment would harm their export sales as Crossbar had already become popular throughout the world.


see also