Ferranti-Packard 6000
Encyclopedia
The FP-6000 was a second generation mainframe
computer developed and built by Ferranti-Packard
in the early 1960s. It is particularly notable for supporting multitasking
, being one of the first commercial machines to do so. Only six FP-6000s were sold before the computer division of Ferranti-Packard was sold off by Ferranti's UK
headquarters in 1963, the FP-6000 becoming the basis for the mid-range machines of the ICT 1900
, which sold into the thousands in Europe.
. For DATAR, Ferranti-Packard (then still known as Ferranti Canada) built an experimental computer to share information among ships in a convoy. Although the prototype was a success, the failure rate of the vacuum tube
s was a concern to everyone and Ferranti suggested they re-build the machine using transistor
s instead. DATAR ran out of funds before this conversion could take place, but Ferranti put the experience to good use in a series of one-off transistorized machines
. One such example was a cheque sorting system built for the Federal Reserve Bank
, itself a modification of a system developed to sort mail for the Canadian Post Office
.
The developmental series eventually culminated in ReserVec
. ReserVec was the first computerized reservation system to enter service when it took over all bookings for Air Canada
in 1961. Ferranti initially had high hopes for the machine, thinking that it would be successful in Europe if sold by the UK headquarter's sales staff. As had happened many times in the past, however, the UK computer team suffered from a terminal case of not invented here
, and decided it was better if they designed their own instead. Their project was never delivered, and ReserVec withered.
Ferranti-Packard was unwilling to simply let the development effort go to waste, and started looking for ways to commercialize the ReserVec hardware into a general purpose mainframe. Ferranti-Packard needed a launch customer to ensure at least one sale, and approached the Federal Reserve Bank again, offering a greatly expanded and more flexible system to replace the earlier custom-wired machine they had delivered only a few years earlier in 1958.
series of process control computers, which date from 1958. The Argus, in turn, bore a strong family resemblance to the Ferranti Pegasus, whose architecture was strongly influenced by Christopher Strachey
. The FP-6000 was implemented with discrete transistor logic circuits that had been developed by Maurice Gribble at Ferranti UK’s Wythenshawe plant, where they were known as ‘griblons’.
In order to be successful the machine would have to differentiate itself from the rest of the "seven dwarfs" in the US computer industry, which were having problems of their own given IBM
s overwhelming presence. After some study they decided one up-and-coming area was multitasking (then known as multiprogramming
), and started looking into ways for their computer to directly support it.
The key problem in supporting multiprogramming was the need for programs to be loaded into different locations in memory, so that more than one could run at the same time. Without multiprogramming a program was normally loaded into the "base" of memory, its notional location zero. In order to provide this environment for several programs, each program was assigned a fixed amount of the core memory, its base location being known as the datum and last location known as the limit. Every store operation by the CPU automatically offset the effective address by the datum. Most of these concepts had originally been developed for Ferranti UK's Ferranti Orion
project, which several members of the FP-6000 team had worked on.
In order to prevent fragmentation of memory, each time a program terminated the FP-6000's operating system
, known as Executive, would temporarily stop the other programs and recopy them to the lowest end of core. This way the available memory was always at the "top". Although this technique eliminated the need for storing a list of memory blocks, it was at the cost of expensive copies every time a program ended. This would make the system unsuitable for running an operating system such as Unix
, which is "made up" of a series of tiny programs that are frequently started and stopped, but Unix did not exist at the time and the model for most operating systems was a sort of "extended batch mode", running long-lived programs.
The machine was also designed from the outset to allow it to scale across a wide variety of needs. The system included 64 hardware channels that could be connected to peripherals of any sort, and could run with a wide variety of core memory sizes. In other ways the machine was fairly similar to the ReserVec's Gemini machine, using a 24-bit word with a 25-bit for parity checking and a simple machine language. One change was the lack of a memory drum, as the advances in core allowed them to replace the drum entirely.
and the other to the Toronto Stock Exchange
(TSX). The later machine allowed the TSX to become the first computerized exchange a few years later. Sales attempts to the City of Toronto
to drive the world's first computerized traffic control system failed, as did a sale to Ontario's Treasury department.
Sales by Ferranti UK were also non-existent. For years the Canadian division had to put up with not invented here
problems and found their efforts continually blocked by the UK computer division's managers. It seemed that the FP-6000 was to suffer a similar fate, and the UK division had argued with the Canadian engineers about practically every part of the design. In fact the real reasons in this case would not become clear until later in the year.
Ferranti had been supporting their UK computer division for over a decade at this point, and had failed to make any significant sales. Management was tired of the drain on company resources, and decided to sell off the division entirely. They initially entered discussions with International Computers and Tabulators
in early 1963, but ICT looked at the continual losses and was less than interested. Ferranti then "sweetened" the deal by showing them the FP-6000, offering to include that in the deal if ICT bought the division.
ICT was in the midst of re-designing its own series of low-end machines, and had been considering licensing an RCA
IBM
-compatible design. However the FP-6000 offered them a more attractive system that was deliberately not IBM-based, and could be scaled with the addition of smaller and larger machines to produce an entire line. ICT was finally interested, as one Ferranti board member put it, "without the FP-6000 we would not have gotten the deal we wanted from ICT. The FP-6000 was the golden brick in the sale of our operations.". The deal was announced in June 1963, to the surprise of the Canadian division.
The FP-6000, with the addition of the ICT Standard Interface, became the ICT 1904
, and a slightly modified version would be offered as the 1905. The Canadian division offered to build both of these machines, which seemed obvious, as well as headquarter North American sales and marketing. However ICT was interested only in the European market, and declined on both offers. The entire hardware team resigned and formed an electronics company known as ESE, later purchased by Motorola
. They were soon followed by the software team, who formed I. P. Sharp Associates
, a major Canadian programming firm of the 1970s and 80s. The team in charge of the system's storage devices left some time later in 1967 to form Teklogix
.
SaskPower ran their FP-6000 for 20 years before retiring it in 1982. The machine was donated to the Western Development Museum in 1983, and is the last remaining example.
Mainframe computer
Mainframes are powerful computers used primarily by corporate and governmental organizations for critical applications, bulk data processing such as census, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and financial transaction processing.The term originally referred to the...
computer developed and built by Ferranti-Packard
Ferranti-Packard
Ferranti-Packard Ltd. was the Canadian division of Ferranti's global manufacturing empire, formed by the 1958 merger of Ferranti Electric and Packard Electric...
in the early 1960s. It is particularly notable for supporting multitasking
Computer multitasking
In computing, multitasking is a method where multiple tasks, also known as processes, share common processing resources such as a CPU. In the case of a computer with a single CPU, only one task is said to be running at any point in time, meaning that the CPU is actively executing instructions for...
, being one of the first commercial machines to do so. Only six FP-6000s were sold before the computer division of Ferranti-Packard was sold off by Ferranti's UK
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
headquarters in 1963, the FP-6000 becoming the basis for the mid-range machines of the ICT 1900
ICT 1900 series
ICT 1900 was the name given to a series of mainframe computers released by International Computers and Tabulators and later International Computers Limited during the 1960s and '70s...
, which sold into the thousands in Europe.
Background
What was to become the FP-6000 had its genesis in a Canadian Navy project starting in 1949 called DATARDATAR
DATAR, short for Digital Automated Tracking and Resolving, was a pioneering computerized battlefield information system.Development on DATAR was started by the Canadian Navy in partnership with Ferranti Canada in 1949. DATAR combined data from various ships providing commanders with an "overall...
. For DATAR, Ferranti-Packard (then still known as Ferranti Canada) built an experimental computer to share information among ships in a convoy. Although the prototype was a success, the failure rate of the vacuum tube
Vacuum tube
In electronics, a vacuum tube, electron tube , or thermionic valve , reduced to simply "tube" or "valve" in everyday parlance, is a device that relies on the flow of electric current through a vacuum...
s was a concern to everyone and Ferranti suggested they re-build the machine using transistor
Transistor
A transistor is a semiconductor device used to amplify and switch electronic signals and power. It is composed of a semiconductor material with at least three terminals for connection to an external circuit. A voltage or current applied to one pair of the transistor's terminals changes the current...
s instead. DATAR ran out of funds before this conversion could take place, but Ferranti put the experience to good use in a series of one-off transistorized machines
Transistor computer
A transistor computer is a computer which uses discrete transistors instead of vacuum tubes. The "first generation" of electronic computers used vacuum tubes, which generated large amounts of heat, were bulky, and were unreliable. A "second generation" of computers, through the late 1950s and...
. One such example was a cheque sorting system built for the Federal Reserve Bank
Federal Reserve Bank
The twelve Federal Reserve Banks form a major part of the Federal Reserve System, the central banking system of the United States. The twelve federal reserve banks together divide the nation into twelve Federal Reserve Districts, the twelve banking districts created by the Federal Reserve Act of...
, itself a modification of a system developed to sort mail for the Canadian Post Office
Canada Post
Canada Post Corporation, known more simply as Canada Post , is the Canadian crown corporation which functions as the country's primary postal operator...
.
The developmental series eventually culminated in ReserVec
ReserVec
ReserVec was a computerized reservation system developed by Ferranti Canada for Trans-Canada Airlines in the late 1950s. It appears to be the first such system ever developed, predating the more famous SABRE system in the US by about two years...
. ReserVec was the first computerized reservation system to enter service when it took over all bookings for Air Canada
Air Canada
Air Canada is the flag carrier and largest airline of Canada. The airline, founded in 1936, provides scheduled and charter air transport for passengers and cargo to 178 destinations worldwide. It is the world's tenth largest passenger airline by number of destinations, and the airline is a...
in 1961. Ferranti initially had high hopes for the machine, thinking that it would be successful in Europe if sold by the UK headquarter's sales staff. As had happened many times in the past, however, the UK computer team suffered from a terminal case of not invented here
Not Invented Here
Not invented here is a term used to describe persistent social, corporate, or institutional culture that avoids using or buying already existing products, research, standards, or knowledge because of their external origins. It is normally used in a pejorative sense, and may be considered an...
, and decided it was better if they designed their own instead. Their project was never delivered, and ReserVec withered.
Ferranti-Packard was unwilling to simply let the development effort go to waste, and started looking for ways to commercialize the ReserVec hardware into a general purpose mainframe. Ferranti-Packard needed a launch customer to ensure at least one sale, and approached the Federal Reserve Bank again, offering a greatly expanded and more flexible system to replace the earlier custom-wired machine they had delivered only a few years earlier in 1958.
Concept
The design they settled on for the new machine, the ‘HARRIAC’, had been specified in England by one of Ferranti’s UK salesmen, Harry Johnson, as a commercial data-processing machine. HARRIAC had much in common with the Ferranti ArgusFerranti Argus
Ferranti's Argus computers were a line of industrial control computers offered from the 1960s into the 1980s. They were widely used in a variety of roles in Europe, particularly in the UK where they continue to serve as monitoring and control systems for nuclear reactors.-Original series:The...
series of process control computers, which date from 1958. The Argus, in turn, bore a strong family resemblance to the Ferranti Pegasus, whose architecture was strongly influenced by Christopher Strachey
Christopher Strachey
Christopher Strachey was a British computer scientist. He was one of the founders of denotational semantics, and a pioneer in programming language design...
. The FP-6000 was implemented with discrete transistor logic circuits that had been developed by Maurice Gribble at Ferranti UK’s Wythenshawe plant, where they were known as ‘griblons’.
In order to be successful the machine would have to differentiate itself from the rest of the "seven dwarfs" in the US computer industry, which were having problems of their own given IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
s overwhelming presence. After some study they decided one up-and-coming area was multitasking (then known as multiprogramming
Multiprogramming
Computer multiprogramming is the allocation of a computer system and its resources to more than one concurrent application, job or user ....
), and started looking into ways for their computer to directly support it.
The key problem in supporting multiprogramming was the need for programs to be loaded into different locations in memory, so that more than one could run at the same time. Without multiprogramming a program was normally loaded into the "base" of memory, its notional location zero. In order to provide this environment for several programs, each program was assigned a fixed amount of the core memory, its base location being known as the datum and last location known as the limit. Every store operation by the CPU automatically offset the effective address by the datum. Most of these concepts had originally been developed for Ferranti UK's Ferranti Orion
Ferranti Orion
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...
project, which several members of the FP-6000 team had worked on.
In order to prevent fragmentation of memory, each time a program terminated the FP-6000's operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
, known as Executive, would temporarily stop the other programs and recopy them to the lowest end of core. This way the available memory was always at the "top". Although this technique eliminated the need for storing a list of memory blocks, it was at the cost of expensive copies every time a program ended. This would make the system unsuitable for running an operating system such as Unix
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
, which is "made up" of a series of tiny programs that are frequently started and stopped, but Unix did not exist at the time and the model for most operating systems was a sort of "extended batch mode", running long-lived programs.
The machine was also designed from the outset to allow it to scale across a wide variety of needs. The system included 64 hardware channels that could be connected to peripherals of any sort, and could run with a wide variety of core memory sizes. In other ways the machine was fairly similar to the ReserVec's Gemini machine, using a 24-bit word with a 25-bit for parity checking and a simple machine language. One change was the lack of a memory drum, as the advances in core allowed them to replace the drum entirely.
Sales
Development of the FP-6000 was completed in late 1962, and the first production machine was delivered to the Federal Reserve Bank in early 1963. The prototype machine was later greatly expanded into the largest FP-6000 installation and sold to Saskatchewan Power, the provincial electrical supply crown corporation for use in performing both engineering calculations and customer billing simultaneously. From there additional sales proved very difficult. Over the next year they sold one to the Defence Research Establishment Atlantic, in Dartmouth, Nova ScotiaDartmouth, Nova Scotia
Dartmouth founded in 1750, is a community and planning area of the Halifax Regional Municipality, Nova Scotia. Located on the eastern shore of Halifax Harbour, Dartmouth has been nicknamed the City of Lakes after the large number of lakes located in the city.On April 1, 1996, the provincial...
and the other to the Toronto Stock Exchange
Toronto Stock Exchange
Toronto Stock Exchange is the largest stock exchange in Canada, the third largest in North America and the seventh largest in the world by market capitalisation. Based in Canada's largest city, Toronto, it is owned by and operated as a subsidiary of the TMX Group for the trading of senior equities...
(TSX). The later machine allowed the TSX to become the first computerized exchange a few years later. Sales attempts to the City of Toronto
Toronto
Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...
to drive the world's first computerized traffic control system failed, as did a sale to Ontario's Treasury department.
Sales by Ferranti UK were also non-existent. For years the Canadian division had to put up with not invented here
Not Invented Here
Not invented here is a term used to describe persistent social, corporate, or institutional culture that avoids using or buying already existing products, research, standards, or knowledge because of their external origins. It is normally used in a pejorative sense, and may be considered an...
problems and found their efforts continually blocked by the UK computer division's managers. It seemed that the FP-6000 was to suffer a similar fate, and the UK division had argued with the Canadian engineers about practically every part of the design. In fact the real reasons in this case would not become clear until later in the year.
Ferranti had been supporting their UK computer division for over a decade at this point, and had failed to make any significant sales. Management was tired of the drain on company resources, and decided to sell off the division entirely. They initially entered discussions with International Computers and Tabulators
International Computers and Tabulators
International Computers and Tabulators or ICT was formed in 1959 by a merger of the British Tabulating Machine Company and Powers-Samas. In 1963 it also added the business computer divisions of Ferranti...
in early 1963, but ICT looked at the continual losses and was less than interested. Ferranti then "sweetened" the deal by showing them the FP-6000, offering to include that in the deal if ICT bought the division.
ICT was in the midst of re-designing its own series of low-end machines, and had been considering licensing an RCA
RCA
RCA Corporation, founded as the Radio Corporation of America, was an American electronics company in existence from 1919 to 1986. The RCA trademark is currently owned by the French conglomerate Technicolor SA through RCA Trademark Management S.A., a company owned by Technicolor...
IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
-compatible design. However the FP-6000 offered them a more attractive system that was deliberately not IBM-based, and could be scaled with the addition of smaller and larger machines to produce an entire line. ICT was finally interested, as one Ferranti board member put it, "without the FP-6000 we would not have gotten the deal we wanted from ICT. The FP-6000 was the golden brick in the sale of our operations.". The deal was announced in June 1963, to the surprise of the Canadian division.
The FP-6000, with the addition of the ICT Standard Interface, became the ICT 1904
ICT 1900 series
ICT 1900 was the name given to a series of mainframe computers released by International Computers and Tabulators and later International Computers Limited during the 1960s and '70s...
, and a slightly modified version would be offered as the 1905. The Canadian division offered to build both of these machines, which seemed obvious, as well as headquarter North American sales and marketing. However ICT was interested only in the European market, and declined on both offers. The entire hardware team resigned and formed an electronics company known as ESE, later purchased by Motorola
Motorola
Motorola, Inc. was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois, which was eventually divided into two independent public companies, Motorola Mobility and Motorola Solutions on January 4, 2011, after losing $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009...
. They were soon followed by the software team, who formed I. P. Sharp Associates
I. P. Sharp Associates
I. P. Sharp Associates, IPSA for short, was a major Canadian computer time sharing, consulting and services firm of the 1970s and 80s. IPSA is particularly well known for its work on the APL programming language, an early packet switching computer network known as IPSANET, and a powerful...
, a major Canadian programming firm of the 1970s and 80s. The team in charge of the system's storage devices left some time later in 1967 to form Teklogix
Teklogix
-About The Company:Teklogix was created in 1967 by Lawrence Cragg together with a small group of engineers.The company focused on mini computer applications. It designed and built complete systems based upon DEC's PDP-8 computer, DEC's logic modules and purpose built logic...
.
SaskPower ran their FP-6000 for 20 years before retiring it in 1982. The machine was donated to the Western Development Museum in 1983, and is the last remaining example.