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Warburg Dillon Read is the investment banking division of UBS AG, and one of the most successful investment banks in the world. Their initial contact with CompSoc was at a recruitment presentation in Michaelmas of 1998. Ex-President Tim Needham met with the Oxford party sent from WDR.

Two of them, Roz Allibone and Mat Ellis, expressed an interest, on behalf of the bank, in forming a long term relationship with the society, specifically sponsorship of events, donation of equipment and so on.

Big Brother

During hilary term of 1999 they visited several events in order to get a feel for the general tone of society talks. Then later on in the term they presented a talk entitled "Big Brother" about increasing infringements on personal freedoms and civil liberties, focussing on data mining, the spread of CCTV, the amount of data stored about an individual etc. The talk was a great success and more are planned in the future.

A Donation

WDR had some equipment which they were decommissioning, and Roz and Mat suggested that CompSoc would benefit from it. So, we arranged to meet, hold a presentation and then have a celebratory meal. Well suffice it to say that when they arrived we were more than surprised by the sheer amount they donated and the spec (as you can see from some of the photos). In total we receieved:

• 1x Enterprise 1, 167MHz, 128Mb RAM, Graphics Card, FW SE SCSI
• 1x Enterprise 1, 167MHz, 256Mb RAM, Graphics Card, FW SE SCSI
• 1x HP C110, 120MHz, 64Mb, DDS 2 Dat Tape Drive, Seagate 15150W Disk
• 3x BA353 Slim Disk Exp (Pizza Boxes)
• 2x BA356 Storage Shelf (Disk Arrays)
• 3x TLZ07 Dat Tape Drive
• 2x TZ88 DLT Tape Drive
• 2x RZ28M 2.0Gb Disks
• 4x RZ28L 2.0Gb Disks
• 8x RZ29B 4.3Gb Disks
• 1x VT525
• 21x TK85 Tapes DLT III
• 6x Dat Cleaning Tapes
• 4x CLT Cleaning Tapes
• Cables

The evening was a great success, the current and ex committees and people from WDR went out to celebrate and had a truly enjoyable evening.

Images

A word of warning - all images are encoded in JPEG format and are quite large, approximately 250Kb each. The photos were taken using a digital camera which was kindly loaned to us by Ganesh Sittampalam for the night. The pictures are in chronological order and fortunately stop before we got too merry!

• Setting Up. The current committee, the ex-committee, Mat Ellis, Roz Allibone, Graham Langford and a mountain of equipment.
• Presentation I. Ex-President Tim Needham (very happily!) accepts WDR's generous donation from Mat Ellis...
• Presentation II. And from Roz Allibone..
• Presentation III. And from Graham Langford.
• Presentation IV. Tim hands the equipment over to current President Jonathan McDowell. (No the shirt is NOT pink, merely a fine red and white stripe...honest!)
• A Job Well Done. Everybody looking very pleased at a job well done, the donation being far larger than any of us had realised. From left to right: Roz Allibone, Graham Langford, Mat Ellis, Steven Wilmot, Tim Needham, Mike Mason, Jonathan Chin, Stuart Adamson, Jonathan McDowell, David Ball and Tristam Fenton-May.

Plans

There are big plans for the new hardware. The 256 Mb Sparc will run Linux and possibly become the main user box for our network, the 128Mb Sparc is going to run Solaris and, if we can get a copy, the HP will run HP/UX. All of which provides a fantastic wealth of opportunities to both our member and our SysAdmin Team to get to grips with using and administering systems that would not otherwise be available to them.

17th May 1999