Warburg Dillon Read (now UBS Warburg)
Note that since this document was written Warburg Dillon Read has been renamed UBS Warburg.
History
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 party sent by 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 — they were interested in 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, focusing on data mining, the spread of CCTV, the amount of data stored about an individual etc. The talk was a great success.
A Donation
WDR had some equipment which they were decommissioning, and Roz and Mat suggested that Compsoc might benefit from it. So we arranged to meet, hold a presentation and then have a celebratory meal. When they arrived we were more than surprised - and delighted - by the sheer amount and specification of the equipment they donated.
In total we received:
- 1 × Sun UltraSparc Enterprise 1, 167MHz, 128 MB RAM, Graphics Card, FW SE SCSI
- 1 × Sun UltraSparc Enterprise 1, 167MHz, 256 MB RAM, Graphics Card, FW SE SCSI
- 1 × Hewlett-Packard C110, 120MHz, 64 MB RAM, DDS 2 DAT Tape Drive, Seagate 15150W Disk
- 3 × BA353 Slim Disk Exp (Pizza Boxes)
- 2 × BA356 Storage Shelf (Disk Arrays)
- 3 × TLZ07 DAT Tape Drive
- 2 × TZ88 DLT Tape Drive
- 2 × RZ28M 2.0 GB Disks
- 4 × RZ28L 2.0 GB Disks
- 8 × RZ29B 4.3 GB Disks
- 1 × VT525
- 21 × TK85 Tapes DLT III
- 6 × DAT Cleaning Tapes
- 4 × DLT Cleaning Tapes
- Various cables
After the handover was complete, the current and previous committees went out with the WDR party to celebrate and had a truly enjoyable evening.
Plans
The following were our plans for the hardware at the time of the donation.
There are big plans for the new hardware. The 256 Mb UltraSparc 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 members and our Sysadmin Team to get to grips with using and administering systems that would not otherwise be available to them.