During my time at Thurnall, I did work mostly for British Nuclear Fuels Ltd (BNFL) and Northwest Water (NWW).
One project for BNFL was in Pascal on OS/9 accessing counter-timer modules on an IEEE bus. The final system was to look for radioactive contamination on the outside of fuel rods. Thurnall was employed to provide the compuer systems and the counter-timer modules but not the actual monitoring equipment. I wrote the software systems and proposed a fix for problems with the inputs to the counter-timer modules.
Other work for BNFL involved QuickBASIC programming, again accessing counter-timer units but this time it was for research work for the Japanese Atomic Energy Research Institute (JAERI).
Thurnall was also employed to provide the robotic "cells" for NWWs water testing lab in Warrington. For that project I was onsite for about a year. The company built the "cells" that each did different tests, the conveyer systems to move bottles of water round the system to be tested in various cells, and the software systems to drive it all. The system was driven by OS/9 units, one for each of the cells and one that monitored and controlled the main conveyer system. They communicated through an ethernet interface and the software was written in C on OS/9. For one cell I wrote software to control a large gantry robot to move bottles of water from a barcode reader to RS232 controlled microwave ovens including the software to drive all the test equipment as well.