Ozegrade3, Biggles78 and all,
I agree, the more of the history that we can write down somewhere, the better....
Just look at the "Did You Fly the Vulcan?" thread here on PPRuNe....
A chance remark by M2dude reminded me of something I meant to write about sometimes... and that has barely been mentioned in the various Concorde stories.
It's the huge gap between the prototypes on the one hand, and the pre-production and production aircraft on the other hand.
It's not just the visor, or the shorter tail.
In my own "field", the AFCS (autopilot, etc.), there was not a lot of similarity between the prototypes and their successors.
The prototypes were "proof-of-concept", designed in the early to mid 1960s.
The pre-production aircraft were designed in the end of the '60s and already close to the production aircraft in most respects.
Some of this difference was due to the very sudden and rapid evolution in electronic technology, with the arrival of the integrated circuit in particular.
The microprocessor - in a way just a large integrated circuit - didn't arrive in time... I don't think there was a single microprocessor on board Concorde until the days that they had to fit TCAS (in the '90s, IIRC).
I'll have to see how to do it.... maybe write it off-line and post snippets on here, then move it into a blog or suchlike?