One processor; 8 virtual processors. Six microsecond memory cycle. That may not 
sound like much, but it was respectable for a 1960 midrange computer; better 
than a 7070, not as good as a 7090

FACT had language support for dealing with hierarchical record structures; to 
bad that never made it into COBOL..


--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3

________________________________________
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [[email protected]] on behalf of 
Clark Morris [[email protected]]
Sent: Thursday, June 25, 2020 4:48 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: FACT was   Re: COBOL and C

[Default] On 27 Apr 2020 04:13:21 -0700, in bit.listserv.ibm-main
[email protected] (Seymour J Metz) wrote:

>> And CPL before that (born in 1963). Yes, COBOL has roots in FLOW-MATIC
>(mostly, with a light dusting of COM-TRAN),
>
>"FACT is fiction"? (Honeywell)

The first full-time job I had coming out of school in 1961 was
Equitable Life Assurance Society where they were installing a
Honeywell 800 and planning to use FACT.  The 800 had 8 processors and
set of registers, 48 bit words and both decimal and binary arithmetic.
A FACT program would use 3 of those sets as I recall. and was
segmented at the paragraph level. It had a number of advanced
features, some of which I would like in today's COBOL.  Unfortunately
it probably required a machine that had 10 times the memory and fast
disk drives instead of one that was basically a tape drive machine
(think rolling in code from tape repeatedly.  My Netbook would be far
better suited to it than the H800 as would a 4341.  I downloaded a
copy of the FACT manual before making this post to refresh my memory.

Clark Morris
>
>Did the CODASYL SRC committee get anything from 9PAC? JOVIAL?

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