Biography Raymond Neate

Ray Neate (1928-1993)

Tim Neate (King’s College, London)

 

Origins

Raymond (Ray) Neate was born in 1928 in Southport. He grew up in Kidsgrove, Staffordshire, living his teenage years during World War 2. After school, he studied for a BSc in Physics at the University of Manchester, 1946-1949.

After graduating, he began working as a scientist at Windscale, Cumberland (now known as Sellafield). The primary purpose of the site was to produce weapons-grade plutonium for use in nuclear weapons for the British post-war nuclear weapons project. Here, he met his future wife Glenys Williams, a native of south Wales, who was one of the few female scientists at the site.  Later, Ray began work at de Havilland Aircraft Company Ltd in Horwich, near Bolton, 1952–55; while there, they lived in Prestwich, Manchester. The couple’s first child was born in 1952, their second in 1955 after their move.

 

The Steel Company of Wales

In 1955, the family moved to Port Talbot, south Wales, where Ray began working in the Operations Research Department of the Steel Company of Wales. The OR Department was tasked with designing the new Abbey Works. While at the Steel Company of Wales, Ray and his team worked on computer simulations of the steel-making process.

From 1956-58, Ray and his close friend John Dacey worked on the computer simulation of melting shop operations. This was one of the earliest uses of a computer to simulate an industrial process and attracted attention.

To run their codes and test the models they created, they travelled by train to the London Computer Centre at 21 Portland Place, London, to make use of their Ferranti Pegasus Mark 1 – a 290 km one-way trip to find out if the code composed in Port Talbot worked!

Their pioneering investigations were reported in their paper A Simulation of Melting Shop Operations (Neate & Dacey, 1959), which was published in The Computer Journal (in Volume 2), which was newly founded by the British Computer Society. The paper won the annual prize selected from all papers considered by the editorial board, published between April 1959 and April 1960. His work at the Steel Company of Wales took him on travels to the USA and eastern Europe, e.g., Czechoslovakia several times.

 

The work led to several follow-up articles and talks – for instance, an article in Process Control and Automation (Neate & Dacey, 1959), a presentation at the British Iron and Steel Making Research Association (BISRA) conference, an invited talk to Northampton College of Advanced Technology (now City, University of London) and a visit the USA to present the paper at the Fall Meeting of the Metallurgical Society in Philadelphia.

The first computer brought into the Steel Company of Wales – and currently thought to be the first in Wales – was the Ferranti Pegasus Mark 1 (No 23), delivered in February 1960. Computers became an increasingly important part of the company’s operations. For instance, in 1967, the Steel Company of Wales bought a Ferranti Argus 500 Mobile Computer. The Steel Company of Wales newspaper The Dragon led with the  headline: ‘Mini Computer On Order — It can be transported by lorry in house on legs’

 

Personal

Ray retired from (the then) British Steel in 1985. Shortly after, he moved to live in the south of Spain, and died in 1993. Ray’s family knew little about his contributions to computer science until, by coincidence, his grandson – the author of this article – was in a talk about the history of computing in South Wales by Prof John Tucker, and saw a familiar name in his citations.

The steel industry in South Wales is increasingly limited in its scope. As of the time of writing this article (October 2024), ‘traditional’ steel processing has stopped at Port Talbot; being replaced with arc furnaces, and production output is less competitive than in the past. However, it is important to remember its role in south Wales, and the wider computing simulation world.

 

Some papers

R. Neate and W. J. Dacey (1959), A simulation of melting shop operations by means of a computer, Process Control and Automation, July 1958

H. G. Jones and R. Neate, Operational research and the logistics of the melting shop, Eleventh Junior Steelmaking Conference, British Iron and Steel Making Research Association (BISRA), 1958 (7-7-58)

R. Neate and W. J. Dacey, A simulation of melting shop operations. The Computer Journal, 2 (2) (1959), 59 67. https://doi.org/10.1093/comjnl/2.2.59

R. Neate and E. Page (1962), Determination of an optimum set of ingot sizes for a steelworks. Paper delivered to Operational Research Society, 15 November. https://doi.org/10.2307/3007389

R. Neate, Supply of scrap to a large OH plant, Steel Times, 1963.

 

Talks

R. Neate, Supply of scrap to a large OH plant, 67th BISRA Steelmaking Conference (Scarborough), 1967.

R. Neate, The simulation of melting shop operations on a computer, Symposium on Metallic Moderator and Cladding Materials, Fall Meeting of the Metallurgical Society, Philadelphia, PA.

R. Neate, The simulation of melting shop operations on a computer. British Computer Society Meeting at Northampton College of Advanced Technology, St. John Street, London, EC1. [Now City, University of London]