Yep, I grew up in Richmond, literally right under the flight path into Heathrow, 2 minutes out.
4 or 5 of them a day a few hundred feet above your head, rattling your windows and your fillings, is a sensation you never forget…
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I thought that they did design it together, amazing collaboration it’s just that they each did most of it in their respective countries. I suspect that the UK bods also had to contend with the new fangled metric system too.
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Yeah, she was at DEC Park ‘90-94 (ish).
Concorde was slightly before my time, but even in recent times (OK, so a year or so ago, before I retired) we had the occasional issue with US equipments mounting holes being in inches, and the spacecraft panels being in millimetres - “tolerance build-ups” and so on. But nothing that could not be solved with “a bit of engineering” 
I seem to remember the Hubble mirror had to be reground for similar reasons…
Hmmm, not sure they reground it - the anomalies were discovered post launch (from memory - 2 microns out of focus?) - but I recall there were some in-orbit modifications made by one of the Shuttle teams.
Had the experience a LHR to JFK Concorde flight back in 2000.
So travelled at Mach 2, 60,000ft & sat there like the 12-year old watching the 1st footage of flight where they bought the Air France and BA versions together.
So how did I get on Concorde - I was delayed from DUB to LHR, and got bumped off my Unitied Airlines LHR to SFO flight.
So the only way of getting me to the Product Launch I was making in the Moscone Centre in SF, was for Aer Lingus to upgrade me from my business class DUB to SFO ticket, was to get to NY on Concorde, and then pick up an afternoon transcontinental flights, with American Airlines to SF. I made it in that evening, ahead of the morning breakfast launch, ahead of that year’s JavaOne event.
It also helped having a ton of Air miles with Aer Lingus, travelling on a destination-destination ticket, and knowing when to use the words “You are the disrupting carrier”.
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Brilliant. Our head of procurement managed to blag himself a Concorde trip back from the US. He walked around site for the next week with his “badge” on display - B***************!
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Oh, I have the Pen, the Certificate signed by the pilot (walked into the cockpit during the flight to get it myself!), all the Stationary from the back of the seat and the BA “Concorde Club” correspondence I got for a year afterwards.
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I never flew on a Concord but did fly on a Lockheed Constellation in 1957, roundtrip, on TWA from Boston to London, with stops in Gander Newfoundland and Shannon Ireland.
A wonderful video is the barrel roll of the Boeing 707 on a demonstration flight over Lake Washington at the annual Hydroplane races. The test pilot did it on his own and was not in the scheduled flight plan.
A short video with the test pilot, Alvin “Tex” Johnston, giving commentary.
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In my first job I did a fair bit of work for the US and bought in lots of US kit, every thing in side the assemblies was imperial and the enclosures /machine stayed metric, I found it quite quaint working in imperial again, ‘12’ has a certain logic, especially when dividing things.
Can’t get that video on the tablet. Will try on the PC later.
There is a similar story told about Concorde where the Test Pilots from France and the UK were flying together. As with the Boeing instructions, “Concorde must not be barrel-rolled”.
OK…red rag to a bull (two bulls in this case). The French pilot did it first, and the Brit (Trubshaw?) took it back the other way…
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Yes, clearly an apochryphal tale 
Nope, and because Concorde had a compact form factor and oodles of power, it “would” have been easier to roll than a 707!
Edit: it was Jean Franch and Brian Walpole who rolled Concorde.
And I’ve now seen the video of the 707 rolling - b***** h***! Respect to Tex Johnston!
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Was DEC absorbed into hp in Bracknell?
My brother in law is terrified of flying. My sister and he took their kids to New York on holiday many years ago (the kids are now 38 and 33), on the way back Dec was too scared to get on the plane. I had been hiking for a week, came back to my place in London to find my sister frantically asking if I had a couple of thousand pounds of instantly accessible cash she could borrow. They’d decided he’d only be able to get back on Concorde as the flight was so much shorter, so she’d flown back with the kids on their scheduled flight and went to find the cash to pay for his flight. He flew back on Concorde, decades later we still never talk about it.
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I did PDP-11 sys admin and sys programmer courses there during that time. (Late for PDPs I know, but we’d bought high performance (for the time) core network switches which used the 11s as their basis.)
Yep, via Compaq, IIRC.
After my time, but I think Compaq eventually got them. When I worked there they were the biggest world computer company if I recall correctly. I first came across them when they were very small in the UK, down at Welwyn in Hertfordshire. PDP 11 era. Later I contracted to help them with moving to desktop PC’s from vax terminals in Holborn, then Reading and moving the estate from windows 3.5 office networks to Win 4, briefly 5 beta and win95, 2000 and exchange and on to 98 and beyond. Interesting times of rapid change in the industry.
My wife was on Alphas by then. PDP11 was what I did at Uni
Although in the late ‘70s we were using a PDP8 for processing telemetry data from UK6/Ariel 6.
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