On Mon, 26 Oct 2020 06:02:21 +0000, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:

> On Sun, 25 Oct 2020 22:58:40 -0000 (UTC)
> Martin Gregorie  wrote:
>
>> I first learned to program in Algol 60 on an Elliott 503 with 8 Kwords
>> (39 bit words) with input on paper tape and output on a lineprinter.
>
>  Lucky sod! Dartmouth BASIC[10] on a 4K word (32 bit) IBM 1130, but
> there was a 1442 card reader/punch attached as well as the paper tape
> reader and a 1403 (not N1 so I missed out on that joy).
>
The Elliott 503 was fast for its time. As well as its 8kword 39-bit 3.6uS
ferrite core main memory it had another 16Kwords of 39-bit 50uS ferrite
core memory that could be used as workspace for large matrix operations
but was normally used as fast external storage: during normal operation
the Algol compiler was loaded from for each compiler run.

I was using the Elliott to analyse spectra output by a Mossbauer
Spectrometer which used a 400 channel Multichannel analyser to capture
output from a scintillation radiation detector. The Eliott was fast
enough for me to analyse the results from a 24 hour spectrometer run
during a standard 3 minute testing slot rather then needing to book time
on it. Three minutes was more than enough time to read my program from a
3 - 3.5 inch roll of paper tape, compile it, read in the data tape output
by the multichannel analyser, analyse it and print the results.

But the Elliott was a physical monster occupying six 2m x 1m x 0.6m steel
cabinets, each weighing 465Kg. In addition there was an operators desk
and full-size 1200 lpm lineprinter. The machine was pre-integrated
circuit technology, so was built entirely from discrete transistors.

Its most unusual feature was that its FP arithmetic operations were 5-10%
faster than integer operations and it stored 2 instructions per word.


--
--
Martin    | martin at
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05