Regnecentralen
Encyclopedia
Denmark
Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...
computer
Computer
A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...
company, founded on October 12, 1955. Through the 1950s and 60s they designed a series of computers, originally for their own use, and later to be sold commercially. Descendants of these systems sold well into the 1980s. They also developed a series of high-speed paper tape machines, and produced Data General Nova
Data General Nova
The Data General Nova was a popular 16-bit minicomputer built by the American company Data General starting in 1969. The Nova was packaged into a single rack mount case and had enough power to do most simple computing tasks. The Nova became popular in science laboratories around the world, and...
machines under license. They are arguably the oldest remaining "computer-only" company in the world.
Genesis
What would become RC started as an advisory board formed by the Danish Akademiet for de Tekniske Videnskaber (Academy of Applied Sciences) to keep abreast of developments in modern electronic computing devicesComputer
A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...
taking place in other countries. After several years in the advisory role, in 1952 they decided to form a computing service bureau
Service bureau
A service bureau is a company which provides business services for a fee. The term has been extensively used to describe technology based services to financial services companies, particularly banks. Customers of service bureaus typically do not have the scale or expertise to incorporate these...
for Danish government, military and research uses. Led by Niels Ivar Bech, the group was also given the details of the BESK
BESK
BESK was Sweden's first electronic computer, using vacuum tubes instead of relays. It was developed by Matematikmaskinnämnden and during a short time it was the fastest computer in the world. The computer was completed in 1953 and in use until 1966...
machine being designed at the Swedish Mathematical Center (Matematikmaskinnamndens Arbetsgrupp).
The group decided to build their own version of the BESK to run the bureau, and formed Regnecentralen in October 1955 to complete and run the machine. The result was the DASK, a 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...
-based machine that completed construction in 1956 and went into full operation in February 1957. DASK was followed in 1961 by the fully 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...
ized GIER, used for similar tasks. GIER is an acronym for "Geodaetisk Instituts Elektronisk Regnemaskine" (Institute of Geodetics Electronic Calculator) and was introduced there on September 14, 1961. GIER proved to be a useful machine, and went on to be used at many Danish universities. Bech also sold GIER machines to the Eastern Bloc
Eastern bloc
The term Eastern Bloc or Communist Bloc refers to the former communist states of Eastern and Central Europe, generally the Soviet Union and the countries of the Warsaw Pact...
nations, starting with Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...
, Hungary
Hungary
Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...
, Poland
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
and Bulgaria
Bulgaria
Bulgaria , officially the Republic of Bulgaria , is a parliamentary democracy within a unitary constitutional republic in Southeast Europe. The country borders Romania to the north, Serbia and Macedonia to the west, Greece and Turkey to the south, as well as the Black Sea to the east...
, and later Romania
Romania
Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...
, the East Germany, and Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia refers to three political entities that existed successively on the western part of the Balkans during most of the 20th century....
.
RC was also home to Peter Naur
Peter Naur
Peter Naur is a Danish pioneer in computer science and Turing award winner. His last name is the N in the BNF notation , used in the description of the syntax for most programming languages...
, and DASK and GIER became particularly well known for their role in the development of the famous ALGOL programming language. After the first European ALGOL conference in 1959, RC started an effort to produce a series of compilers, completing one for the DASK in September 1961. A version for the GIER followed in August 1962. Christian Andersen, another RC employee, wrote the first introductory text on the language, Everyman's Desk ALGOL, in 1961.
Peripheral business
In order to support higher throughput at their own service bureau, RC developed several high-speed input/outputInput/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...
devices. One of their most popular was the RC 2000 paper tape reader, introduced in 1963. Feeding the tape at 5 meters per second, the 2000 could read 2,000 characters per second (CPS), storing the results in a buffer while the computer periodically read the data back out instead of stopping the tape to wait for the computer to get ready. The machine was later upgraded as the RC 2500, increasing speed to almost 7 meters a second, improving read speed to 2500 CPS. The RC 2000/2500 became a major product for RC during the 1960s, selling 1,500 examples around the world. Several related devices were added to the line, including a high-speed punch and a dedicated data conversion machine that would "massage" data between formats to ease the burden on the host computer.
In 1964 Regnecentralen was taken public, although the majority of the company's shares were held by its biggest customers.
New computers
In the mid-1960s, RC started the design of a small integrated circuitIntegrated circuit
An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit is an electronic circuit manufactured by the patterned diffusion of trace elements into the surface of a thin substrate of semiconductor material...
-based computer system for industrial control and automation
Automation
Automation is the use of control systems and information technologies to reduce the need for human work in the production of goods and services. In the scope of industrialization, automation is a step beyond mechanization...
needs, initially to fill a request by a Danish company to automate a chemical factory they were building in Poland
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
. The RC 4000 design emerged in 1966 and was completed for the factory the next year. When combined with appropriate peripheral
Peripheral
A peripheral is a device attached to a host computer, but not part of it, and is more or less dependent on the host. It expands the host's capabilities, but does not form part of the core computer architecture....
s, almost always including an RC 2000 along with several re-branded devices from other companies, the RC 4000 was a highly reliable minicomputer
Minicomputer
A minicomputer is a class of multi-user computers that lies in the middle range of the computing spectrum, in between the largest multi-user systems and the smallest single-user systems...
, and went on to be sold across Europe. The RC 8000 from the mid-1970s used newer-generation ICs to shrink the RC 4000 into a single rack-mount system. The last in the series, the RC 9000, further shrunk the machine and improved performance to about 4 MIPS, and was sold in versions that could run either RC 8000 programs, or 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...
.
The RC 4000 is particularly famous for its 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...
, developed by Per Brinch Hansen
Per Brinch Hansen
Per Brinch Hansen was a Danish-American computer scientist known for concurrent programming theory.-Biography:He was born in Frederiksberg, in Copenhagen, Denmark....
. Known simply as Monitor, it is the first real-world example of a system using an extremely simple kernel along with a variety of user-selected programs that built up the system as a whole. Today this concept is known as a microkernel
Microkernel
In computer science, a microkernel is the near-minimum amount of software that can provide the mechanisms needed to implement an operating system . These mechanisms include low-level address space management, thread management, and inter-process communication...
, and efforts to correct for Monitor's poor performance formed the basis of most OS research through the 1970s and 1980s.
Data General Nova
The Data General Nova was a popular 16-bit minicomputer built by the American company Data General starting in 1969. The Nova was packaged into a single rack mount case and had enough power to do most simple computing tasks. The Nova became popular in science laboratories around the world, and...
under license in 1970 as the RC 7000, later introducing their own updated version as the RC 3600 the next year. This series filled a niche similar to the RC 4000, but for much smaller installations. The RC 3600 became a fixture of many Danish schools and universities.
During the 1980s, RC produced the RC 700 Piccolo and RC 759 Piccoline systems, which were primarily sold to Danish schools (although some were sold to companies both in Denmark and abroad). The Piccolo was powered by the Zilog
Zilog
Zilog, Inc., previously known as ZiLOG , is a manufacturer of 8-bit and 24-bit microcontrollers, and is most famous for its Intel 8080-compatible Z80 series.-History:...
Z80A CPU, while the Piccoline was powered by the Intel 80186 processor.
Regnecentralen was acquired by ICL in 1989.
External links
- - museum site with many RC related papers, mostly in DanishDanish languageDanish is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in the country of Denmark. It is also spoken by 50,000 Germans of Danish ethnicity in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where it holds the status of minority language...
- - overview of RC's history, scanned from a booklet presumably created in the 1970s. Several important pages are missing.