Ferranti Orion
Encyclopedia
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.
Performance of the system was much less than expected and the Orion was a business disaster, selling only about eleven machines. The Orion 2 project was quickly started to address its problems, and five of these were sold. The failure of the Orion was the capstone to a long series of losses for the Manchester labs, and with the failure of the Orion management grew tired of the entire market. The division was sold to International Computers and Tabulators
(ICT), who selected the Canadian Ferranti-Packard 6000
as their mid-range offering, ending further sales of the Orion 2.
s were expensive and relatively fragile devices. Although they had advantages for computer designers, namely lower power requirements and their smaller physical packaging, vacuum tube
s remained the primary logic device until the early 1960s. Through this period there were widespread efforts to use magnetic amplifier
s as an alternative solid state
device.
Similar to magnetic core memory
, or "cores", magnetic amplifiers used small toroids of ferrite
as a switching element. When current passed through the core a magnetic field would be induced that would reach a maximum value based on the saturation point of the material being used. The field induced current in a separate read circuit, creating an amplified output. Unlike digital logic based on tubes or transistors, which uses defined voltages to represent values, magnetic amplifiers based their logic values on current flows. This was known as "Ballot Box Logic" due to the way the inputs "voted" on the output.
One advantage to magnetic amplifiers is that they are open in the center and several input lines can be threaded through them. This makes it easy to implement chains of "OR" logic by threading a single core with all the inputs that need to be ORed together. This was widely used in the "best two out of three" circuits that were widely used in binary adders, which could reduce the component count of the ALU
considerably. Another way to use this feature was to use the same cores for different duties during different periods of the machine cycle, say to load memory during one portion and then as part of an adder in another. Each of the cores could be used for as many duties as there was room for wiring through the center.
In the late 1950s new techniques were introduced in transistor manufacture that led to a rapid fall in prices while reliability shot up. By the early 1960s most magnetic amplifier efforts were abandoned. Few machines using the circuits reached the market, the best known examples being the mostly-magnetic UNIVAC Solid State
(1959) and the mostly transistorized English Electric KDF9
(1963).
Manchester
had originally been set up as an industrial partner of Manchester University's pioneering computer research lab, commercializing their Manchester Mark 1
and several follow-on designs. During the 1950s, under the direction of Brian Pollard, the Gorton labs also researched magnetic amplifiers. Like most teams, they decided to abandon them when transistors improved.
One member of the lab, Ken Johnson, proposed a new type of transistor-based logic that followed the same conventions as the magnetic amplifiers, namely that binary logic was based on known currents instead of voltages. Like the magnetic amplifiers, Johnson's "Neuron" design could be used to control several different inputs. Better yet, the system often required only one transistor per logic element, whereas conventional voltage-based logic would require two or more. Although transistors were falling in price they were still expensive, so a Neuron based machine might offer similar performance at a much lower price than a machine based on traditional transistor logic.
The team decided to test the Neuron design by building a small machine known as "Newt", short for "Neuron test". This machine was so successful that the lab decided to expand the testbed into a complete computer. The result was the Sirius
, which was announced on 19 May 1959 with claims that it was the smallest and most economically priced computer in the European market. Several sales followed.
, and would form the basis for Ferranti's sales for the next five years.
Looking for a launch customer, Ferranti signed up Prudential Assurance
with the promise to deliver the machine in 1960. However, these plans quickly went awry. The Neuron proved unable to be adapted to the larger physical size of the Orion. Keeping the current levels steady over the longer wire runs was extremely difficult, and efforts to cure the problems resulted in lengthy delays. The first Orion was eventually delivered, but was over a year late and unit cost was more than expected, limiting its sales. Between 1962 and 1964 the Computing Division lost $7.5 million, largely as a result of the Orion.
, started raising increasingly vocal concerns about the effort. Several members from Bracknell approached Gordon Scarrott and tried to convince him that Orion should be developed using an all-transistor design. They recommended using the "Griblons" circuits developed by Maurice Gribble at Ferranti's Wythenshawe
plant, which they had used to successfully implement their Argus
computer for the Bristol Bloodhound missile system. Their efforts failed, they turned to Pollard to overrule Scarrott, which led to a series of increasingly acrimonious exchanges. After their last attempt on 5 November 1958, they decided to go directly to Sebastian de Ferranti, but this effort also failed.
Pollard resigned about a month later and his position was taken over by Peter Hall. Braunholtz later expressed his frustration that they didn't write to him directly, and the matter sat for several years while Orion continued to run into delays. In September 1961 Prudential was threatening to cancel their order, and by chance, Braunholtz at that moment sent a telegram to Hall expressing his continuing concerns. Hall immediately invited Braunholtz to talk about his ideas, and several days later the Bracknell team was working full out on what would become the Orion 2.
By the end of October the basic design was complete, and the team started looking for a transistor logic design to use for implementation. Although Braunholtz had suggested using the Griblons, the Bracknell group also invited a team of engineers from Ferranti Canada
to discuss their recent successes with their "Gemini" design, which was used in their ReserVec
system. On November 2 the Bracknell team decided to adopt the Gemini circuitry for Orion 2.
Parts arrived from many Ferranti divisions over the next year, and the machine was officially switched on by Peter Hunt on 7 January 1963. The first Orion 2 was delivered to Prudential
on 1 December 1964, running at about five times the speed of the Orion 1. Prudential bought a second machine for the processing of industrial branch policies. Another system was sold to the South African Mutual Life Assurance Society in Cape Town where it was used for updating insurance policies. A fourth was sold to Beecham Group to upgrade its Orion 1 system. The original prototype was kept by ICT and used for software development by the Nebula Compiler team.
By this point, however, Ferranti was already well on the road to selling all of its business computing divisions to ICT. As part of their due diligence
process, ICT studied both the Orion 2 and the FP-6000. Ferranti's own engineers concluded that "There are certain facets of the system we do not like. However, were we to begin designing now a machine in the same price/performance range as the FP6000, we would have in some 18 months' time a system that would not be significantly better -if indeed any better- than the FP6000." ICT chose to move forward with the FP-6000 with minor modifications, and used it as the basis for their ICT 1900 series
through the 1960s. Existing contracts for the Orion 2 were filled, and sales ended.
The basic Orion machine included 4,096 48-bit
words of slow, 12µs, core memory, which could be expanded to 16,384 words. Each word could be organized as eight 6-bit characters, a single 48-bit binary number, or a single floating-point number with 40-bits of "fraction" and an 8-bit exponent. The system included built-in capabilities for working with Pound sterling
before decimalization. The core memory was backed by one or two magnetic drums with 16k words each. Various offline input/output included magnetic disks, tape drive
s, punched card
s, punched tape
and printers.
Most of the Orion's instruction set
used a three-address form, with sixty-four 48-bit accumulators. Each program had its own private accumulator set which were the first 64 registers of its address space, which was a reserved contiguous subset of the physical store, defined by the contents of a "datum" relocation register. Operand addresses were relative to the datum, and could be modified by one of the accumulators for indexing arrays and similar tasks. A basic three-address instruction took a minimum of 64 µs, a two-address one 48 µs, and any index modifications on the addresses added 16 µs per modified address. Multiplication took from 156 to 172 µs, and division anywhere from 564 to 1,112 µs, although the average time was 574 µs. The Orion 2, having a core store with a much shorter cycle time, was considerably faster.
A key feature of the Orion system was its built-in support for time-sharing
. This was supported by a series of input/output
(I/O) interrupts, or what they referred to as "lockouts". The system automatically switched programs during the time spent waiting for the end of an I/O operation. The Orion also supported protected memory in the form of pre-arranged "reservations". Starting and stopping programs, as well as selecting new ones to run when one completed, was the duty of the "Organisation Program." The Orion was one of the earliest machines to directly support time-sharing in hardware in spite of intense industry interest; other time-sharing systems of the same era include PLATO in early 1961, CTSS later that year, and the English Electric KDF9
and FP-6000 of 1964.
The Orion is also notable for the use of its own high-level business language, NEBULA. Nebula was created because of Ferranti's perception that the COBOL
standard of 1960 was not sufficiently powerful for their machines, notably as COBOL was developed in the context of decimal, character-oriented batch processing
, while Orion was a binary word-oriented multiprogramming system. NEBULA adapted many of COBOL's basic concepts, adding new ones of their own. NEBULA was later ported to the Atlas as well.
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...
introduced by Ferranti
Ferranti
Ferranti or Ferranti International plc was a UK electrical engineering and equipment firm that operated for over a century from 1885 until it went bankrupt in 1993. Known primarily for defence electronics, the Company was once a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index but ceased trading in 1993.The...
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
Atlas Computer (Manchester)
The Atlas Computer was a joint development between the University of Manchester, Ferranti, and Plessey. The first Atlas, installed at Manchester University and officially commissioned in 1962, was one of the world's first supercomputers, considered to be the most powerful computer in the world at...
and smaller systems like the Sirius
Ferranti Sirius
Ferranti's Sirius was a small business computer released in 1961. Designed to be used in smaller offices without a dedicated programming staff, the Sirius used decimal arithmetic instead of binary, supported Autocode to ease programming, was designed to fit behind a standard office desk, and ran on...
and Argus
Ferranti 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...
. The Orion was based on a new type of logic circuit known as "Neuron" and included built-in 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...
support, one of the earliest commercial machines to do so.
Performance of the system was much less than expected and the Orion was a business disaster, selling only about eleven machines. The Orion 2 project was quickly started to address its problems, and five of these were sold. The failure of the Orion was the capstone to a long series of losses for the Manchester labs, and with the failure of the Orion management grew tired of the entire market. The division was sold to 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...
(ICT), who selected the Canadian Ferranti-Packard 6000
Ferranti-Packard 6000
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...
as their mid-range offering, ending further sales of the Orion 2.
Magnetic amplifiers
During the 1950s transistorTransistor
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 were expensive and relatively fragile devices. Although they had advantages for computer designers, namely lower power requirements and their smaller physical packaging, 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 remained the primary logic device until the early 1960s. Through this period there were widespread efforts to use magnetic amplifier
Magnetic amplifier
The magnetic amplifier is an electromagnetic device for amplifying electrical signals. The magnetic amplifier was invented early in the 20th century, and was used as an alternative to vacuum tube amplifiers where robustness and high current capacity were required...
s as an alternative solid state
Solid state (electronics)
Solid-state electronics are those circuits or devices built entirely from solid materials and in which the electrons, or other charge carriers, are confined entirely within the solid material...
device.
Similar to magnetic core memory
Magnetic core memory
Magnetic-core memory was the predominant form of random-access computer memory for 20 years . It uses tiny magnetic toroids , the cores, through which wires are threaded to write and read information. Each core represents one bit of information...
, or "cores", magnetic amplifiers used small toroids of ferrite
Ferrite (magnet)
Ferrites are chemical compounds consisting of ceramic materials with iron oxide as their principal component. Many of them are magnetic materials and they are used to make permanent magnets, ferrite cores for transformers, and in various other applications.Many ferrites are spinels with the...
as a switching element. When current passed through the core a magnetic field would be induced that would reach a maximum value based on the saturation point of the material being used. The field induced current in a separate read circuit, creating an amplified output. Unlike digital logic based on tubes or transistors, which uses defined voltages to represent values, magnetic amplifiers based their logic values on current flows. This was known as "Ballot Box Logic" due to the way the inputs "voted" on the output.
One advantage to magnetic amplifiers is that they are open in the center and several input lines can be threaded through them. This makes it easy to implement chains of "OR" logic by threading a single core with all the inputs that need to be ORed together. This was widely used in the "best two out of three" circuits that were widely used in binary adders, which could reduce the component count of the ALU
Arithmetic logic unit
In computing, an arithmetic logic unit is a digital circuit that performs arithmetic and logical operations.The ALU is a fundamental building block of the central processing unit of a computer, and even the simplest microprocessors contain one for purposes such as maintaining timers...
considerably. Another way to use this feature was to use the same cores for different duties during different periods of the machine cycle, say to load memory during one portion and then as part of an adder in another. Each of the cores could be used for as many duties as there was room for wiring through the center.
In the late 1950s new techniques were introduced in transistor manufacture that led to a rapid fall in prices while reliability shot up. By the early 1960s most magnetic amplifier efforts were abandoned. Few machines using the circuits reached the market, the best known examples being the mostly-magnetic UNIVAC Solid State
UNIVAC Solid State
The UNIVAC Solid State was a 2-address, bi-quinary coded decimal computer, with memory on a rotating drum with 5000 signed 10 digit words, spinning at 17,667 RPM in a helium atmosphere. It was announced by Sperry Rand in December 1958, as a response to the IBM 650...
(1959) and the mostly transistorized English Electric KDF9
English Electric KDF9
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...
(1963).
Neuron
The Ferranti Computer Department in West GortonGorton
Gorton is an area of the city of Manchester, in North West England. It is located to the southeast of Manchester city centre. Neighbouring areas include Longsight and Levenshulme....
Manchester
Manchester
Manchester is a city and metropolitan borough in Greater Manchester, England. According to the Office for National Statistics, the 2010 mid-year population estimate for Manchester was 498,800. Manchester lies within one of the UK's largest metropolitan areas, the metropolitan county of Greater...
had originally been set up as an industrial partner of Manchester University's pioneering computer research lab, commercializing their Manchester Mark 1
Manchester Mark 1
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 or "Baby" . It was also called the Manchester Automatic Digital Machine, or MADM...
and several follow-on designs. During the 1950s, under the direction of Brian Pollard, the Gorton labs also researched magnetic amplifiers. Like most teams, they decided to abandon them when transistors improved.
One member of the lab, Ken Johnson, proposed a new type of transistor-based logic that followed the same conventions as the magnetic amplifiers, namely that binary logic was based on known currents instead of voltages. Like the magnetic amplifiers, Johnson's "Neuron" design could be used to control several different inputs. Better yet, the system often required only one transistor per logic element, whereas conventional voltage-based logic would require two or more. Although transistors were falling in price they were still expensive, so a Neuron based machine might offer similar performance at a much lower price than a machine based on traditional transistor logic.
The team decided to test the Neuron design by building a small machine known as "Newt", short for "Neuron test". This machine was so successful that the lab decided to expand the testbed into a complete computer. The result was the Sirius
Ferranti Sirius
Ferranti's Sirius was a small business computer released in 1961. Designed to be used in smaller offices without a dedicated programming staff, the Sirius used decimal arithmetic instead of binary, supported Autocode to ease programming, was designed to fit behind a standard office desk, and ran on...
, which was announced on 19 May 1959 with claims that it was the smallest and most economically priced computer in the European market. Several sales followed.
Orion 1
With the success of Sirius, the team turned its attention to a much larger design. Since many of the costs of a complete computer system are fixed - power supplies, printers, etc. - a more complex computer with more internal circuitry would have more of its cost associated with the circuits themselves. For this reason, a larger machine made of Neurons would have an increased price advantage over transistorized offerings. Pollard decided that such a machine would be a strong counterpart to the high-end AtlasAtlas Computer (Manchester)
The Atlas Computer was a joint development between the University of Manchester, Ferranti, and Plessey. The first Atlas, installed at Manchester University and officially commissioned in 1962, was one of the world's first supercomputers, considered to be the most powerful computer in the world at...
, and would form the basis for Ferranti's sales for the next five years.
Looking for a launch customer, Ferranti signed up Prudential Assurance
Prudential plc
Prudential plc is a multinational financial services company headquartered in London, United Kingdom.Prudential's largest division is Prudential Corporation Asia, which has over 15 million customers across 13 Asian markets and is a top-three provider of life insurance in mainland China, Hong...
with the promise to deliver the machine in 1960. However, these plans quickly went awry. The Neuron proved unable to be adapted to the larger physical size of the Orion. Keeping the current levels steady over the longer wire runs was extremely difficult, and efforts to cure the problems resulted in lengthy delays. The first Orion was eventually delivered, but was over a year late and unit cost was more than expected, limiting its sales. Between 1962 and 1964 the Computing Division lost $7.5 million, largely as a result of the Orion.
Orion 2
During the Orion's gestation it appeared there was a real possibility the new system might not work at all. Engineers at other Ferranti departments, notably the former Lily Hill House in BracknellBracknell
Bracknell is a town and civil parish in the Borough of Bracknell Forest in Berkshire, England. It lies to the south-east of Reading, southwest of Windsor and west of central London...
, started raising increasingly vocal concerns about the effort. Several members from Bracknell approached Gordon Scarrott and tried to convince him that Orion should be developed using an all-transistor design. They recommended using the "Griblons" circuits developed by Maurice Gribble at Ferranti's Wythenshawe
Wythenshawe
Wythenshawe is a district in the south of the city of Manchester, England.Formerly part of the administrative county of Cheshire, in 1931 Wythenshawe was transferred to the City of Manchester, which had begun building a massive housing estate there in the 1920s to resolve the problem of its inner...
plant, which they had used to successfully implement their Argus
Ferranti 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...
computer for the Bristol Bloodhound missile system. Their efforts failed, they turned to Pollard to overrule Scarrott, which led to a series of increasingly acrimonious exchanges. After their last attempt on 5 November 1958, they decided to go directly to Sebastian de Ferranti, but this effort also failed.
Pollard resigned about a month later and his position was taken over by Peter Hall. Braunholtz later expressed his frustration that they didn't write to him directly, and the matter sat for several years while Orion continued to run into delays. In September 1961 Prudential was threatening to cancel their order, and by chance, Braunholtz at that moment sent a telegram to Hall expressing his continuing concerns. Hall immediately invited Braunholtz to talk about his ideas, and several days later the Bracknell team was working full out on what would become the Orion 2.
By the end of October the basic design was complete, and the team started looking for a transistor logic design to use for implementation. Although Braunholtz had suggested using the Griblons, the Bracknell group also invited a team of engineers from Ferranti Canada
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...
to discuss their recent successes with their "Gemini" design, which was used in their 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...
system. On November 2 the Bracknell team decided to adopt the Gemini circuitry for Orion 2.
Parts arrived from many Ferranti divisions over the next year, and the machine was officially switched on by Peter Hunt on 7 January 1963. The first Orion 2 was delivered to Prudential
Prudential plc
Prudential plc is a multinational financial services company headquartered in London, United Kingdom.Prudential's largest division is Prudential Corporation Asia, which has over 15 million customers across 13 Asian markets and is a top-three provider of life insurance in mainland China, Hong...
on 1 December 1964, running at about five times the speed of the Orion 1. Prudential bought a second machine for the processing of industrial branch policies. Another system was sold to the South African Mutual Life Assurance Society in Cape Town where it was used for updating insurance policies. A fourth was sold to Beecham Group to upgrade its Orion 1 system. The original prototype was kept by ICT and used for software development by the Nebula Compiler team.
By this point, however, Ferranti was already well on the road to selling all of its business computing divisions to ICT. As part of their due diligence
Due diligence
"Due diligence" is a term used for a number of concepts involving either an investigation of a business or person prior to signing a contract, or an act with a certain standard of care. It can be a legal obligation, but the term will more commonly apply to voluntary investigations...
process, ICT studied both the Orion 2 and the FP-6000. Ferranti's own engineers concluded that "There are certain facets of the system we do not like. However, were we to begin designing now a machine in the same price/performance range as the FP6000, we would have in some 18 months' time a system that would not be significantly better -if indeed any better- than the FP6000." ICT chose to move forward with the FP-6000 with minor modifications, and used it as the basis for their ICT 1900 series
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...
through the 1960s. Existing contracts for the Orion 2 were filled, and sales ended.
Description
Although the Orion and Orion 2 differed significantly in their internals, their programming interface and external peripherals were almost identical.The basic Orion machine included 4,096 48-bit
48-bit
Computers with 48-bit words include CDC 1604 and BESM-6.The IBM AS/400, in its CISC variants, is a 48-bit addressing system. The address size used in logical block addressing was increased to 48 bits with the introduction of ATA-6....
words of slow, 12µs, core memory, which could be expanded to 16,384 words. Each word could be organized as eight 6-bit characters, a single 48-bit binary number, or a single floating-point number with 40-bits of "fraction" and an 8-bit exponent. The system included built-in capabilities for working with Pound sterling
Pound sterling
The pound sterling , commonly called the pound, is the official currency of the United Kingdom, its Crown Dependencies and the British Overseas Territories of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, British Antarctic Territory and Tristan da Cunha. It is subdivided into 100 pence...
before decimalization. The core memory was backed by one or two magnetic drums with 16k words each. Various offline input/output included magnetic disks, tape drive
Tape drive
A tape drive is a data storage device that reads and performs digital recording, writes data on a magnetic tape. Magnetic tape data storage is typically used for offline, archival data storage. Tape media generally has a favorable unit cost and long archival stability.A tape drive provides...
s, punched card
Punched card
A punched card, punch card, IBM card, or Hollerith card is a piece of stiff paper that contains digital information represented by the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions...
s, punched tape
Punched tape
Punched tape or paper tape is an obsolete form of data storage, consisting of a long strip of paper in which holes are punched to store data...
and printers.
Most of the Orion's instruction set
Instruction set
An instruction set, or instruction set architecture , is the part of the computer architecture related to programming, including the native data types, instructions, registers, addressing modes, memory architecture, interrupt and exception handling, and external I/O...
used a three-address form, with sixty-four 48-bit accumulators. Each program had its own private accumulator set which were the first 64 registers of its address space, which was a reserved contiguous subset of the physical store, defined by the contents of a "datum" relocation register. Operand addresses were relative to the datum, and could be modified by one of the accumulators for indexing arrays and similar tasks. A basic three-address instruction took a minimum of 64 µs, a two-address one 48 µs, and any index modifications on the addresses added 16 µs per modified address. Multiplication took from 156 to 172 µs, and division anywhere from 564 to 1,112 µs, although the average time was 574 µs. The Orion 2, having a core store with a much shorter cycle time, was considerably faster.
A key feature of the Orion system was its built-in support for time-sharing
Time-sharing
Time-sharing is the sharing of a computing resource among many users by means of multiprogramming and multi-tasking. Its introduction in the 1960s, and emergence as the prominent model of computing in the 1970s, represents a major technological shift in the history of computing.By allowing a large...
. This was supported by a series of input/output
Input/output
In computing, input/output, or I/O, refers to the communication between an information processing system , and the outside world, possibly a human, or another information processing system. Inputs are the signals or data received by the system, and outputs are the signals or data sent from it...
(I/O) interrupts, or what they referred to as "lockouts". The system automatically switched programs during the time spent waiting for the end of an I/O operation. The Orion also supported protected memory in the form of pre-arranged "reservations". Starting and stopping programs, as well as selecting new ones to run when one completed, was the duty of the "Organisation Program." The Orion was one of the earliest machines to directly support time-sharing in hardware in spite of intense industry interest; other time-sharing systems of the same era include PLATO in early 1961, CTSS later that year, and the English Electric KDF9
English Electric KDF9
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...
and FP-6000 of 1964.
The Orion is also notable for the use of its own high-level business language, NEBULA. Nebula was created because of Ferranti's perception that the COBOL
COBOL
COBOL is one of the oldest programming languages. Its name is an acronym for COmmon Business-Oriented Language, defining its primary domain in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments....
standard of 1960 was not sufficiently powerful for their machines, notably as COBOL was developed in the context of decimal, character-oriented batch processing
Batch processing
Batch processing is execution of a series of programs on a computer without manual intervention.Batch jobs are set up so they can be run to completion without manual intervention, so all input data is preselected through scripts or command-line parameters...
, while Orion was a binary word-oriented multiprogramming system. NEBULA adapted many of COBOL's basic concepts, adding new ones of their own. NEBULA was later ported to the Atlas as well.
Further reading
- "Orion Programmers' Reference Manual", Ferranti, 1961
- "The Ferranti ORION Computer System", contains numerous details and material on the Orion series
- Henry Goodman, "The Simulation of the Orion Time Sharing System on the Sirius" ,The Computer Bulletin, Volume 5 Number 2 (September 1961)