Central computer and Instrument control

When the British joined the ILL in 1973 a new department of Computing and Electronics, DIE, was created with a British head of department, Dennis Rimmer, with the responsibility to develop the control of instruments and the treatment of the subsequent data. The secretaries included Christianne Tillosen (replaced at times by Winnie Hollenburg). Initially Anton Axmann was in charge of electronics and control computing, with Michael Taeschner in charge of the computers. Axmann returned to Germany in 1975, shortly followed by Taeschner. Winfried Drexel was given charge of the electronics group responsible for the counting and positioning systems, and the control computers. When he changed to special services for scientists at "Niveau D", he was replaced by Faudou who gave the responsability of informatics to Barthelemy and electronics to Klesse. The central computer group, Calcul Scientifique, was headed by Yvon Siret, which operated the PDP10 central computer, and provided general support including numerical analysis.

During the long shutdown (1991-1994) staff reductions were imposed. The FNE plan (in French: Fond National pour l'Emploi) was implemented and Rimmer was forced into retirement. The Institut was reorganised with each deputy director becoming head of a division. Computing and electronics became groups within the Projects and Techniques division. Scientific computing activities became a group in the Science Division; fortunately, apart from formal management, the cross-collaborations between scientists and the technical groups remained active.

At the initial stages of the Institut there were few operational instruments and the central computer was not available. The original choice of control systems had been made a couple of years earlier, and were strongly based on using shared minicomputers, although already experience in the UK at Harwell, and in the US, showed the complexity of such systems and unreliability were unfavourable compared to the extra cost of individual computers. The committee of two experts from France and Germany chose a French and a German control computer manufacturers to control the step-scanning diffractometers and three-axis spectrometers, and multichannel data acquisition for a second set of instruments, respectively.
When Mössbauer replaced Maier-Leibnitz as director he knew of the utility of the PDP10 computer in the nuclear physics community (and also that it could offer real-time facilities to experiments). By proposing the rental of such a system he obviated the nationality requirements for a major acquisition. It was also possible to install this machine in not much more than a corridor!