Research

The Orion was a mid-range mainframe computer introduced by Ferranti in 1959 and installed for the first time in 1961. Ferranti positioned Orion to be their primary offering during the early 1960s, complementing their high-end Atlas and smaller systems like the Sirius and Argus. The Orion was based on a new type of logic circuit known as "Neuron" and included built-in multitasking support, one of the earliest commercial machines to do so.

The Elliott 803 was a small, medium speed digital computer manufactured by the British company Elliott Brothers in the 1960s. About 250 were built and most British universities and colleges bought one.

The ICL Series 39 was a range of mainframe and minicomputer computer systems released by the UK manufacturer ICL in 1985.

International Computers Limited, or ICL, was a large British computer hardware, computer software and computer services company that operated from 1968 until 2002 when it was renamed Fujitsu Services Limited after its parent company, Fujitsu. The company's most successful product line was the ICL 2900 Series range of mainframe computers.

KDF9 was an early British computer designed and built by English Electric, later English Electric Leo Marconi, EELM, later still incorporated into ICL. It first came into service in 1964 and was still in use in 1980 in at least one installation. The present article presents a synoptic overview of the architecture of the KDF9; for a more complete account, see ‘The English Electric KDF9’, and ‘The Hardware of the KDF9’, at the links below.

The AN/USQ-20, or Naval Tactical Data System (NTDS), was designed as a more reliable replacement for the AN/USQ-17 with the same instruction set. The first batch of 17 computers were delivered to the Navy starting in early 1961. A version of the AN/USQ-20 for use by the other military services and NASA was designated the UNIVAC 1206. Another version, designated the G-40, replaced the vacuum tube UNIVAC 1104 in the BOMARC Missile Program.

The AN/USQ-17 or Naval Tactical Data System (NTDS) computer referred to in Sperry Rand documents as the Univac M-460, was Seymour Cray's last design for UNIVAC. UNIVAC later released a commercial version, the UNIVAC 490 and that system was later upgraded to a multiprocessor configuration as the 494.

The CDC 3000 series computers from Control Data Corporation were mid-1960s follow-ons to the CDC 1604 and CDC 924 systems. Over time, a range of machines were produced - divided into the 'upper 3000 series' and the 'lower 3000 series'. CDC phased out production of the 3000 series in the early 1970s. The 3000 series were the 'cash cows' of Control Data during the 1960s; sales of these machines funded the company while the 6000 series was designed.

The Manchester Mark 1 was one of the earliest stored-program computers, developed at the Victoria University of Manchester from the Small-Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM) or "Baby" (operational in June 1948). It was also called the Manchester Automatic Digital Machine, or MADM. Work began in August 1948, and the first version was operational by April 1949; a program written to search for Mersenne primes ran error-free for nine hours on the night of 16/17 June 1949.

Council for Scientific and Industrial Research Automatic Computer), originally known as CSIR Mk 1, was Australia's first digital computer, and the fourth stored program computer in the world. It was first to play digital music[1][2] and is one of only two surviving first-generation computers[3] (the other is the Zuse Z4).