Malcolm, It was "10 Base" which made it really stange after working on the singer 1500 which was octal based for some years. The actual physical byte size was in fact 6 Bits with a 10 bit instruction size. All in all a very very strange machine to work on and one that I tried to avoid whenever possible.
The big advantage of it though, as we were selling againse IBL FEP's (Front end Processors), was that it had actual "magnetic core memory" so you could switch the power off and then back on without any problems. This was a gread demonstration to potential customers until we got taken over by ICL and they moved to solid state memory. The salesmen - being stuck in a time warp would automatically throw the switch in the middle of a demo and then realise their mistake - much to the hilarity of us support staff! We also had thin ethernet on the 1500 series, before anyone else but called it serial I/O and then ICL emasculated the kit to call it the ICL DRS which completely. On the first project I worked on a team of 10 of us wrote a multi tasking/multi-user kernel server operating system which could support up to 64 users including a database manager in a 32K machine with full ISAM file support. Code was overlayed in and out with real time code generation/modification so debugging was ...let us say difficult as once you set the machine going the O/S continually patched itself according to the workload. What with 2.5 Mb FEDS (Fixed Exchangable Disks) wr all thought we had the Rolls Royce of a machine - and it could fit under your arm as well. Oh Happpy Days. Dave Crozier "A computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match" - Bill Bryson -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Malcolm Greene Sent: 12 June 2006 13:06 To: [email protected] Subject: RE: [NF] Stob: IT neologisms. > On the Singer system 10 which I started to work on in the ealy 70's we > had a 10 bit byte. Is that "10" base 10 or binary? :) Malcolm [excessive quoting removed by server] _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
