Anthony Dorey: Calculations- the Computer

"The Vosper Thornycroft take-over took place in 1966, and by that time we were certainly using computer programmes for the main design calculations in naval architecture. Like strength, like displacement, like stability and even the sort of rather more difficult things like the investigation of what happens to a ship when a compartment is flooded. These were things which we didn't do in the office in those days. We sent it away to a bureau, a specialist computer calculating bureau for shipbuilding, and this was an industry wide set-up called the Ship Research Association, the SRA. And they developed these computer programmes on behalf of the industry and so we used to send our data up, exactly the dimensions of the ship, and they would do the calculations and send the results back to us. And then, during the 60s, the computer programmes became much better - they were refined. And computers got more and more powerful and smaller and smaller so that it became easier for a company like ours to have its own computer systems. As time went on, we did more and more of the computing calculations ourselves."