UNIVAC 490
Encyclopedia
Microsecond
A microsecond is an SI unit of time equal to one millionth of a second. Its symbol is µs.A microsecond is equal to 1000 nanoseconds or 1/1000 millisecond...
cycle time made by UNIVAC
UNIVAC
UNIVAC is the name of a business unit and division of the Remington Rand company formed by the 1950 purchase of the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, founded four years earlier by ENIAC inventors J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, and the associated line of computers which continues to this day...
. It was a commercial derivative of a computer Univac Federal Systems developed for the U..S. Navy. That system was the heart of the Naval Tactical Data System which pioneered the use of shipboard computers for air defense. The military version went by a variety of names: AN/USQ-20
AN/USQ-20
The AN/USQ-20, or Naval Tactical Data System , was designed as a more reliable replacement for the AN/USQ-17 with the same instruction set. The first batch of 17 computers were delivered to the Navy starting in early 1961. A version of the AN/USQ-20 for use by the other military services and NASA...
, MIL-1206 and CP642. Seymour Cray
Seymour Cray
Seymour Roger Cray was an American electrical engineer and supercomputer architect who designed a series of computers that were the fastest in the world for decades, and founded Cray Research which would build many of these machines. Called "the father of supercomputing," Cray has been credited...
designed this system before he left UNIVAC to found Control Data Corporation
Control Data Corporation
Control Data Corporation was a supercomputer firm. For most of the 1960s, it built the fastest computers in the world by far, only losing that crown in the 1970s after Seymour Cray left the company to found Cray Research, Inc....
.
- f - Function code designator (6 bits)
- j - Branch condition designator (3 bits)
- k - Operand-interpretation designator (3 bits)
- b - Operand address modification designator (3 bits)
- y - Operand designator (15 bits)
Numbers were represented in ones' complement.
The machine provided the programmer with the following register
Processor register
In computer architecture, a processor register is a small amount of storage available as part of a CPU or other digital processor. Such registers are addressed by mechanisms other than main memory and can be accessed more quickly...
s:
- Seven B-registers (Address modifying index registerIndex registerAn index registerCommonly known as a B-line in early British computers. in a computer's CPU is a processor register used for modifying operand addresses during the run of a program, typically for doing vector/array operations...
s) 15 bits each - One A-register or accumulator 30 bits
- One Q-register and auxiliary arithmetic register 30 bits
Various customers used this machine type - principally airline
Airline
An airline provides air transport services for traveling passengers and freight. Airlines lease or own their aircraft with which to supply these services and may form partnerships or alliances with other airlines for mutual benefit...
reservations systems at Eastern Air Lines
Eastern Air Lines
Eastern Air Lines was a major United States airline that existed from 1926 to 1991. Before its dissolution it was headquartered at Miami International Airport in unincorporated Miami-Dade County, Florida.-History:...
(1963) and British European Airways
British European Airways
British European Airways or British European Airways Corporation was a British airline which existed from 1946 until 1974. The airline operated European and North African routes from airports around the United Kingdom...
(BEACON - 1964).
The standard Operating System was REX (RealTime Exec), except at Eastern and B.E.A. where a custom operating system was developed for airline reservations (CONTORTS - CONTrol Of Real Time System). CONTORTS was the origin of Univac's subsequent RT operating systems for 494 (STARS) and later converted to the 1100 Series
UNIVAC 1100/2200 series
The UNIVAC 1100/2200 series is a series of compatible 36-bit computer systems, beginning with the UNIVAC 1107 in 1962, initially made by Sperry Rand...
(RTOS).