Honeywell 800

The Datamatic Division of Honeywell announced the H-800 electronic computer in 1958. The first installation occurred in 1960. A total of 89 were delivered. The H-800 design was part of a family of 48-bit word, three-address instruction format computers that descended from the Datamatic 1000, which was a joint Honeywell and Raytheon project started in 1955. The 1800 and 1800-II were follow-on designs to the H-800.[1][2]

Data

The basic unit of data was a word of 48 bits. This could be divided in several ways:

Hardware

The basic system had:

Extra peripherals could be added running through additional controllers with a theoretical possibility of 56 tape units.[3]

Up to 12 more main memory banks could be added.[3]

A random access disc system with a capacity of 800 million alphanumeric characters could be added.[3]

Multiprogram control allowed up to 8 programs to be sharing the machine, each with its own set of 32 special registers.[3]

A Floating-Point Unit was optionally available. The 48 bit word allowed a seven bit exponent and 40 bit mantissa. So numbers between 10−78 and 10+76 were possible and precision was 12 decimal places.[3] If the customer did not buy the floating point unit, then floating point commands were implemented by software simulation.

Peripheral devices included: high-density magnetic tapes, high-speed line printers, fast card and paper tape readers and punches to high-capacity random access magnetic disc memories, optical scanners, self-correcting orthoscanners and data communications devices.[3]

Software

Available software included:

References

  1. Mark Smotherman Paper about the Honeywell 800
  2. The author was programming this machine from January to August 1966 for the Eastern Electricity Board. Staff from General Electric Company plc and South Eastern Electricity Board attended the same courses.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Company Sales Manual for the Honeywell 1800

Further reading

Jane King, William A. Shelly, "A Family History of Honeywell's Large-Scale Computer Systems," IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 42–46, Oct.-Dec. 1997, doi:10.1109/85.627898

External links

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