By Andy McCue, 5 September 2008 14:42
The Elliott 803 was developed in the early 1960s and until 1965 it was the single most popular British computer for big businesses and universities.
This is the console for the Elliott 803 on display at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park.
It has no screen or keyboard and programming the machine was done initially through the front panel. The user would manually set up an address in memory, the instruction would be programmed into that memory and then stored there. The process was repeated step-by-step, loading instructions into memory. Once the programme was complete, the user would then switch over to 'obey' and start the machine running.
To see the Elliott 803 in action, check out our video here.
Photo Credit: Andy McCue/silicon.com
Comments
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1. R. Mark Clayton
I remeber seeing one of these in operation in the early 1970's.
In fact only the boot program was entered on hand switches, normal programs were on paper tape.
A computer scientist had worked out that you could compile an assembler program in two passes as long as the second pass was in reverse, so as the source was read in the punch generated an intermediate tape. This was then read in backwards in the second pass and the final program punched out.
2. Rog
What a blast from the past !
I can recall "playing" with an old 803 in my formative IT years as an Operator working at Keele Uni - messing about with the instruction set and the mag film to program tunes on the console speaker etc. or line printer "pictures".
Our main system then was the Elliot/NCR 4130 with 64K memory which filled a cab 6'x6'x3'....
We used to keep our fish & chip dinners warm in the similar sized cab housing PSU transformers while we changed mag tapes of loaded card decks.
'Elf & Safety'?!
3. Richard Sarson
Sorry, the Joe Lyons LEO ran its first business program in November 1951, predating Elliott by about ten years. The LEO guys called LEO the World's first business computer.
LEO was a version of the Cambridge University EDSAC, specially adapted with paper-tape input for business use.
I would describe the Elliott machine as the first "Mini", and was, I seem to remember, mostly used for technical and manufacturing applications. Super machine, like most of the early British computers.
4. Brian Boutel
I programmed these in 1962. The basic memory was not 4KB, but 4K 39-bit words. Each word could store 2 instructions. The first 4 words of memory had hard-wired instructions that would read in a binary paper tape and load it into memory. This was usually used to load a loader program ("the TIs") that would read and load a paper tape containing a program at a higher level (numeric addresses in decimal relative to a block start). Toggling the console keys was not usual, except to specify a location to start loading.
5. steve brandom
Not sure this is the oldest business computer. I used an Elliot 503 at British Steel's Operational Research centre in Sheffield in 1975. It had valve memory, a tape drum for high speed access storage (1 w/r head per track). OS and programs were loaded from paper tape. We used it for cross compiler (i.e. portable) development. It had a 39 bit word; so you could generate, ICL1900 (24 bit), IBM360/370 (32 bit), Unisys 1108 and native code!
6. Ian Beaty
I too started my programming career on one of these machines at BP's Research Centre. Amazingly it had an Algol compiler which had to be front loaded from tape before a program could be entered. We certainly learned to be efficient with memory space.
7. anonymous
My grandfather worked on the development of this at Elliott. Quite strange to see it again. I'll have to dig out the photos of him stood next to the prototype!
8. anonymous
This year was the fiftieth anniversary of Unilever's first computer, an Elliott 405. Looking at photos and a contemporary film, the most interesting thing was how little has changed. We still end up with gargage out if we put garbage in!