ILL - Other Computing activities

The computerisation of the secretariats started with a typewriter (probably the Olivetti TES 401) equipped with a digital display for the two last lines being typed. The displayed lines could be corrected electronically but once validated they were physically printed on the sheet of paper.

The automation really started with secretaries using VT100/PT100 vdu based word processing running on a PDP11 RSTS system (1981, Grevaz). Work for the scientific programme, scheduling and the regular meetings of the scientific subcommittees were also developed in-house.

In 1985, at a time were the first Macs demonstrated the power of personal computers for automation, the ILL selected a centralised solution driven by a VAX and developed by the company ITOS. When it was abandoned (1991), no solution was available to convert documents from the private format of ITOS to any other. The DRe funded  a reverse engineering approach and the Mac software DiamItos (Diadème Ingénierie and A. Filhol) was developed for converting ITOS files to Word 5.

PCs/Macintoshes and Microsoft Office soon became the standard tools for word processing and presentation activities. Later (1999) HR projects were developed in-house using Oracle on HP system hardware which were housed in part of the computer room no longer occupied by the behemoth main-frame systems of the 1980’s.

An earley form of teleworking started at the ILL with the first Anderson Jacobson acoustic modems on which a telephone handset could be placed, and developed with Hayes modems (1981) or even with a mere Minitel. This made it possible to work from home on a screen (VT100), or on a portable terminal, mainly for data procesing or software development. The most popular terminals were the Texas Instrument Silent 700 (1972) which had a thermal printer, and the Teletype T43 (1979) which had a needle printer (80 to 132 characters per line).
Remote monitoring of ILL instruments also became possible and this was gradually implemented. E.g. the electronics engineer Yves Lefebvre installed an electronic organ on the instrument D7 (?) which answered the telephone by playing different music depending on the measurement status. Remote control arrived much later.

The first  external ILL web was launched in 1996, integrating pages written by instrument responsibles, and IT groups.  It was developed in pure HTML by the D3 responsible Eddy Lelièvre-Berna and was hosted on the mail server which was external to the proxy server. The SCO entrusted to Fabien Pinet the creation of new web hosted on a dedicated server. This development was also in pure HTML. It has been available since 1998 and rapidly gained use for technical documentation which had been notably absent until then.

A full redesign was performed in 2007 using the Typo3 CMS. There are now departmental web-servers and an intranet site for the administration and scientific programme management, each with its own support staff. A redesign more communication-oriented was performed in 2017 with the outside company eMagineurs. The ILL web was split in two sites, a modernized one and an archive one.