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Exhibit
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Strand
Lightboard

From the Royal Opera House.

For the National Theatre, lighting designer Richard Pilbrow dreamt of, and then designed, 'a system which offers to the artist far greater opportunities for subtle manipulation of light than has been possible hitherto, that will in time extend the boundaries and possibilities of stage lighting'.

Strand accepted the challenge of building it. Its development name: TCS: Total Control System.

The specs tell one story: for the brains, Lightboard used a DEC PDP-11 minicomputer but even with that it needed custom processing to calculate fades for the Olivier Theatre's 700+ dimmers. It had just 64K of memory and a 1MHz processor - compare those to the specs of even the watch on your wrist today.

But it could still do things no current console can do, particularly with its ability to mix light on its multiple palette whleels and to remember what was on those wheels for later. And even back in 1976 it could control the rig of Pani moving lights the National had from its opening - something its replacement, the Galaxy, couldn't initially do!