Whitechapel Computer Works

Whitechapel Computer Works Ltd. (WCW) was a computer workstation company founded in the East End of London, United Kingdom in April 1983 by Timothy Eccles and Bob Newman, with a combined investment of £1 million from the Greater London Enterprise Board (£100,000 initially[1]), venture capital companies Newmarket and Baillie Gifford,[2] and the Department of Trade and Industry.

The company was situated in the Whitechapel Technology Centre—a council-funded high-technology enterprise hub—and began the design of their first workstation model in August 1983, shipping the first units by September 1984.

In order to deliver the machine at prices closer to personal computers than contemporary workstations (such as Sun, Apollo and Perq), design techniques from the personal computer industry were adopted, with a single eight-layer system board being used to hold the CPU and other integrated circuits.

[13] In order to improve responsiveness and reduce the latency observed with contemporary Unix systems, the mouse position was tracked using a dedicated processor which also monitored the keyboard for events, and a form of hardware mouse pointer was used, with the pointer bitmap being stored in its own 64-pixel buffer as a kind of overlay, this being combined with the main display image to produce the final screen image.

[3] The machine also featured a "soft power switch" similar to that provided by the Apple Lisa (and also the slightly later Torch Triple X[14]) which initiated "an orderly UNIX shutdown".

[23] These ran the UMIPS variant of UNIX, with either X11 or NeWS-based GUIs, and were aimed at computer animation applications.

Whitechapel had reportedly sold as many as 1,000 workstations from its first range, these having been "particularly successful" in the London financial industry, and was aiming to increase production levels by relocating manufacturing from the UK to West Germany.

[33] Mistral launched the Mistral-20 workstation in late 1989, based on a 25 MHz R3000 processor and running Unix SVR3 with BSD 4.3 extensions.