Walton Industrial Park, Stone, Staffordshire, UK
After university, I started work as a
software developer for Instem Computer Systems, Stone,
Staffordshire. At the time (1989-1993)Instem specialised in
industrial computer systems and electronics.
Instem Computer Systems was one
division in a small group of companies that make up Instem Plc. The
other two divisions provide electronic manufacturing services and
laboratory systems.
At that time Instem Computer
Systems developed and integrated Supervisory Control and Data
Acquisition Systems for the utility industries. The Division
focused on the UK utilities, and in particular Electricity
Generation, Electricity Transmission, Electricity Distribution,
Water and Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing.
Despite their fairly small size,
Instem had an impressive clientele and track record. In the power
generation, transmission and distribution industries Instem's
clients included Nuclear Electric, National Grid Company, National
Power, PowerGen, East Midlands Electricity, Midlands Electricity,
Manachester and NorthWest Electricity and South West
Electricity.
The company was established in 1970
and went public in 1984. Instem's facilities are still located in
Stone, Staffordshire, just off the M6 motorway in the centre of the
UK.
At Instem I worked on four major
projects:
- Littlebrook: This project
produced a complete, replacement monitoring system for the Littlebrook oil-fired, power station in
Kent, UK. The system was written in C and FORTRAN for a network of
Digital Micro-VAX machines con nected to Insteam's I-Range data
acquisition devices.
- CSM: The Cable
Section Monitoring (CSM)system project collected and processed
information from electricity transmission cables belonging to the
UK National Grid. Again, largely written in C and FORTRAN for
Digital Micro-VAX machines but with the added twist of
multiple Unix workstations providing an X-Windows-based user
interface.
- Aberthaw: This project developed a
new Automated Boiler Control system for the Aberthawcoal-fired, power station in South
Wales. This project was written in the old Central Electricity
Generating Board's (CEGB's) Generic CUTLASS language and ran on
16-bit Digital PDP-11 machines, a big step backwards from the
modern 32-bit Micro-VAX's -based systems written in C
and FORTRAN of the previous two projects.
- MEB/EME: This project updated of
electricity substation remote monitoring and control systems for
the East Midlands Electricity Board, UK and
the Midlands Electricity Board, UK.Although there were separate
contracts with the two clients, the software development aspects of
projects were so similar that they shared development resources.
This time it was embedded C running on a Motorola 68020 based
industrial computer and included a four month trip to Calgary,
Canada to work closely with the software engineers of industrial
computer's manufacturer.
I left Instem in the summer of 1993
after getting married and moved to Singapore.