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65-537: The Computer Research Corporation (CRC) was an early developer of minicomputers . It was founded on July 16, 1950. The founding owners of CRC were Floyd Steele , Donald Eckdahl, Hrant (Harold) Sarkinssian, Richard Sprague, and Irving S. Reed . With the exception of Reed, all members of the CRC had been on the design team for the MADDIDA , a special-purpose digital computer developed from 1946 to 1949 for Northrop . Realizing that

130-610: A problem-oriented language (POL) could be used to make a general-purpose computer function as a differential analyzer , the MADDIDA design team left Northrup in 1950 to focus on designing general-purpose computers, leading to them to found the CRC. After developing the Cadac , an early minicomputer, the CRC was sold to National Cash Register (NCR) in February 1953, launching NCR into the digital computing business. This computer hardware article

195-447: A 4 MHz basic clock cycle, much faster than the earlier machines' 500 kHz. Both used core memory which was available in two cycle times. The Argus 400 used a 2 μs core whereas the Argus 500 had 2 μs in earlier machines and 1 μs for later ones, doubling performance. The difference between the 400 and 500 was similar to the split between the 100 and 300, in that the 500 had

260-454: A digital computer was easily able to accomplish the calculations. He suggested placing the computers at the Orange Yeoman radar sites as calculation centers that would feed this information to the missile batteries. Whitehead was a friend of Gribble's and was aware of his work on a small computer, and first raised the issue sometime in autumn 1959. Once the decision had been made to move to

325-462: A digital computer, all sorts of secondary tasks were handed off to the machine. This included everything from maintenance testing to missile launch control to the calculation of Doppler "zero points" where the signal would be expected to drop to zero as the target crossed at right angles to the radar. The original design was followed in 1963 by the single-ALU Argus 100 , which cost around £20,000 (equivalent to approximately £430,000 in 2020 ). Unlike

390-575: A few proprietary minicomputer architectures survive. The IBM System/38 operating system, which introduced many advanced concepts, lives on with IBM's AS/400 . Great efforts were made by IBM to enable programs originally written for the IBM System/34 and System/36 to be moved to the AS/400. After being rebranded multiple times, the AS/400 platform was replaced by IBM Power Systems running IBM i . In contrast, competing proprietary computing architectures from

455-471: A maximum of 8,192 words. A simple mnemonic programming language called ASSIST, comprising 17 single-address instructions, was developed for the new machine. Costing around £1,700 when introduced in 1970, at the time the Argus 600 was cheapest digital computer available in the United Kingdom. It could be linked directly or via telephone lines to larger computers and its hardware interface allowed modules from

520-724: A parallel ALU and the 400 was serial. The Argus 400 had an add time (two 24 bit numbers) of 12 μs. The Argus 500 (with 1 μs store) took 3 μs. Divide (the longest instruction) took 156 μs on the Argus 400 and the Argus 500 took 9 μs. The Argus 500 was of course much more expensive. A CORAL 66 high-level programming language compiler for the Argus 500 was developed by the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment under contract to Ferranti for use in industrial control and automation projects. Typical Argus 500 installations were chemical plants (process control) and nuclear power stations (process monitoring). A later application

585-404: A range on the order of 200 miles (320 km). To reach these ranges, the missile was "lofted" in a nearly vertical trajectory at launch, flying as quickly as possible to high altitude where it suffered less drag during the subsequent long cruise toward the target. During the vertical climb, the missile's radar would not be able to see the target, so during this period it was command guided from

650-470: A result, less expensive. They were used in manufacturing process control, telephone switching and to control laboratory equipment. In the 1970s, they were the hardware that was used to launch the computer-aided design (CAD) industry and other similar industries where a small dedicated system was needed. The boom in worldwide seismic exploration for oil and gas in the early 1970s saw the widespread use of minicomputers in dedicated processing centres close to

715-579: A wall, while the computer attempted to move a second headlamp to lay on the same spot on the wall. Ferranti continued development of the system, and during 1958 they completed a prototype of a commercial product which they showed publicly for the first time at the Olympia in November. This machine used new circuitry that ran at the much faster rate of 500 kHz. The name "Argus" (from the Greek God of that name)

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780-426: Is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Minicomputer The class formed a distinct group with its own software architectures and operating systems. Minis were designed for control, instrumentation, human interaction, and communication switching as distinct from calculation and record keeping. Many were sold indirectly to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) for final end-use application. During

845-448: Is seldom used today; the contemporary term for this class of system is " midrange computer ", such as the higher-end SPARC from Oracle , Power ISA from IBM , and Itanium -based systems from Hewlett-Packard . The term "minicomputer" developed in the 1960s to describe the smaller computers that became possible with the use of transistors and core memory technologies, minimal instructions sets and less expensive peripherals such as

910-406: Is sometimes pointed to as an early example of a minicomputer, as it was small, transistorized and (relatively) inexpensive. However, its basic price of $ 100,000 (equivalent to $ 1,029,921 in 2023) and custom desk-like chassis places it within the "small system" or "midrange computer" category as opposed to the more modern use of the term minicomputer. Nevertheless, it retains a strong contender for

975-747: The Royal Air Force for a Bloodhound Mk.II simulator and the Vickers VC10 flight simulator built at Redifon and delivered to RAF Brize Norton in 1967. The model used on the VC10 Simulator was a 3520B, this meant that it had (20)kWords of memory and a (B)acking Store. Redifon also used the 350 on the Air Canada DC9 flight simulator that was installed in Montreal in the Spring of 1966. The 350's were delivered in

1040-538: The Torness nuclear power station, which had a far more sophisticated control system than earlier members of the advanced gas-cooled reactor fleet, including Digital Direct Control (DDC) of the reactors. When first installed it was probably the most sophisticated and complex computerised control system for a nuclear power station worldwide; the system was implemented using the CORAL high-level programming language . Each reactor in

1105-519: The flip-flops from the earlier system, and a plugboard for programming. The first delivery would be to Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) to go into use as the control system for ICI's soda ash / ammonia plant at Fleetwood . An agreement was reached in March 1960 and the machine was installed April/May 1962. This was the first large factory to be controlled directly by a digital computer. Other European sales followed. The Argus circuitry

1170-566: The workstation machines opened new markets for graphics-based systems that the terminal-oriented minis could not even address. Minis retained a force for those using existing software products or those who required high-performance multitasking, but the introduction of newer operating systems based on Unix began to become highly practical replacements for these roles as well. For computational science , clusters of commodity PCs largely replaced minicomputers. Mini vendors began to rapidly disappear through this period. Data General responded to

1235-567: The 1967 to 1969 timeframe. The design of the Argus 400 started at the same time as the Argus 300. In logical terms the 400 was similar to the earlier 100, using serial ALUs. However, it featured an entirely new electrical system. Previous machines used germanium transistors to form the logic gates. The Argus 400 used silicon transistors in a NOR-logic designed by Ferranti Wythenshawe called MicroNOR II , with more "conventional" logic where 0 and +4.5 represented binary 1 and 0, respectively. The rest of

1300-410: The 1970s. Breaking with the past, the next series of Argus machines were completely new designs and not backward compatible. The Argus 600 was an 8-bit machine, intended for use by manufacturers of electrical and electronic equipment who required a relatively simple computer or programmable control device. It possessed a basic core memory of 1,024 words , expandable in blocks of the same size up to

1365-461: The ASR ;33. Another common difference was that most earlier small machines were not "general purpose", in that they were designed for a specific role like process control or accounting . On these machines, programming was generally carried out in their custom machine language , or even hard-coded into a plugboard , although some used a form of BASIC . DEC wrote, regarding their PDP-5, that it

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1430-530: The Argus 100. The 300 was very successful and used throughout the 1960s in various industrial roles. A variant of the 300 was the Argus 350 , which allowed external access to its core to allow direct memory access . This improved performance of input/output , avoiding having to move data via code running on the processor. The 350 was used in various military simulators, including the Royal Navy for frigate, submarine and helicopter-based anti-submarine training, and

1495-466: The Argus range of peripheral and plant connection equipment to be added as required. The Argus 600 was followed by the Argus 700 , which used 16-bit architecture. Design of the 700 started around 1968/9 and the range was still in production in the mid 1980s achieving international success for industrial and military applications. The 700 is still operational at several British nuclear power stations in 2020 in control and data processing applications. It

1560-515: The Boadicea seat booking network for BOAC . This removed the multiply and divide functions as these used a significant number of expensive JK flip-flops and it was cost effective at the time to save these 24 and a few other components. Overall, the 500 proved to be one of Ferranti's best-selling products, and found especially wide use on oil platforms during the opening of the North Sea oil fields during

1625-1282: The base software environment for the NonStop Servers, and has been extended to include support for Java and integration with popular development tools like Visual Studio and Eclipse . Later, Hewlett-Packard would split into HP and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. The NonStop products and the DEC products would then be sold by HPE. A variety of companies emerged that built turnkey systems around minicomputers with specialized software and, in many cases, custom peripherals that addressed specialized problems such as computer-aided design , computer-aided manufacturing , process control , manufacturing resource planning , and so on. Many if not most minicomputers were sold through these original equipment manufacturers and value-added resellers . Several pioneering computer companies first built minicomputers, such as DEC , Data General , and Hewlett-Packard (HP) (who now refers to its HP3000 minicomputers as "servers" rather than "minicomputers"). And although today's PCs and servers are clearly microcomputers physically, architecturally their CPUs and operating systems have developed largely by integrating features from minicomputers. In

1690-401: The boards and plating through the circuit boards. The drawing office had to learn how to design multilayer boards, which was first laid out on tape then transferred to film. It took around two years for the Argus 400 to go into production, with the first delivery in 1966, weighing more than 13 kilograms (29 lb). The Argus 500 , designed about 3 years later, used parallel arithmetic and

1755-455: The changing market by focusing entirely on the high-performance file server market, embracing a role within large LANs that appeared resilient. This did not last; Novell NetWare rapidly pushed such solutions into niche roles, and later versions of Microsoft Windows did the same to Novell. DEC decided to move into the large-computer space instead, introducing the VAX 9000 mainframe in 1989, but it

1820-469: The creation of an entire industry of minicomputer companies along Massachusetts Route 128 , including Data General , Wang Laboratories and Prime Computer . Other popular minis from the era were the HP 2100 , Honeywell 316 and TI-990 . Early minis had a variety of word sizes , with DEC's 12 and 18-bit systems being typical examples. The introduction and standardization of the 7-bit ASCII character set led to

1885-483: The data collection crews. Raytheon Data Systems RDS 704 and later RDS 500 were predominantly the systems of choice for nearly all the geophysical exploration as well as oil companies. At the launch of the MITS Altair 8800 in 1975, Radio Electronics magazine referred to the system as a "minicomputer", although the term microcomputer soon became usual for personal computers based on single-chip microprocessors . At

1950-696: The development of packet switching networks in the UK. These machines were used by Ferranti during early experiments at the General Post Office as the basis for early routers . In this respect they are similar to the Interface Message Processors built in the US to serve a similar role during the development of the Internet . Over 70 Argus 700G processors were used in the control and instrumentation systems of

2015-487: The dual reactor station had 10 input multiplexing computers, 11 control dual-processor computers, and a supervisory triple-processor computer with a standby backup. The M700 series of computers was based on the architecture and instruction set of the Ferranti Argus 700 computer series. Both M700 computers and Argus 700 computers have a common overall instruction set. However, particular models do not necessarily implement

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2080-485: The early 1980s, such as DEC's VAX , Wang VS , and Hewlett-Packard's HP 3000 have long been discontinued without a compatible upgrade path. OpenVMS was ported to HP Alpha and Intel IA-64 ( Itanium ) CPU architectures, and now runs on x86-64 processors. Tandem Computers , which specialized in reliable large-scale computing, was acquired by Compaq in 1997, and in 2001 the combined entity merged with Hewlett-Packard . The NonStop Kernel-based NonStop product line

2145-517: The first digital computer to be used to directly control an entire factory. They were widely used in a variety of roles in Europe, particularly in the UK, where a small number continue to serve as monitoring and control systems for nuclear reactors . The original concept for the computer was developed as part of the Blue Envoy missile project. This was a very long-range surface-to-air missile system with

2210-402: The foundation for all current versions of Microsoft Windows , borrowed design ideas liberally from VMS . Many of the first generation of PC programmers were educated on minicomputer systems. Ferranti Argus Ferranti 's Argus computers were a line of industrial control computers offered from the 1960s into the 1980s. Originally designed for a military role, a re-packaged Argus was

2275-591: The ground. Argus began as a system to read the radar data, compute the required trajectory, and send that to the missile in-flight. The system not only had to develop the trajectory, but also directly controlled the control surfaces of the missile and thus had a complete control feedback system. Development was carried out by Maurice Gribble at Ferranti's Automation Division in Wythenshawe starting in 1956. The system used OC71 transistors from Mullard , originally designed for use in hearing aids . They could only be run at

2340-644: The later 1970s. Most mini vendors introduced their own single-chip processors based on their own architecture and used these mostly in low-cost offerings while concentrating on their 32-bit systems. Examples include the Intersil 6100 single-chip PDP-8, DEC T-11 PDP-11, microNOVA and Fairchild 9440 Nova, and TMS9900 TI-990. By the early 1980s, the 16-bit market had all but disappeared as newer 32-bit microprocessors began to improve in performance. Those customers who required more performance than these offered had generally already moved to 32-bit systems by this time. But it

2405-423: The low speed of 25 kHz, but this was enough for the task. Blue Envoy was cancelled in 1957 as part of the sweeping 1957 Defence White Paper . Ferranti decided to continue the development of the computer for other uses. During a visit by Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh in November 1957, they set up a system with an automotive headlamp connected to a handle that could be moved by hand to shine at any point on

2470-423: The minicomputer class. Similar models using magnetic delay-line memory followed in the early 1960s. These machines, however, were essentially designed as small mainframes, using a custom chassis and often supporting only peripherals from the same company. In contrast, the machines that became known as minicomputers were often designed to fit into a standard chassis and deliberately designed to use common devices like

2535-526: The modern definition. Its introductory price of $ 18,500 (equivalent to $ 178,866 in 2023) places it in an entirely different market segment than earlier examples like the CDC 160. In contemporary terms, the PDP-8 was a runaway success, ultimately selling 50,000 examples. Follow-on versions using small scale integrated circuits further lowered the cost and size of the system. Its success led to widespread imitation, and

2600-496: The move to 16-bit systems, with the late-1969 Data General Nova being a notable entry in this space. By the early 1970s, most minis were 16-bit, including DEC's PDP-11 . For a time, "minicomputer" was almost synonymous with "16-bit", as the larger mainframe machines almost always used 32-bit or larger word sizes. As integrated circuit design improved, especially with the introduction of the 7400-series integrated circuits , minicomputers became smaller, easier to manufacture, and as

2665-547: The new RISC approach promised performance levels well beyond the fastest minis, and even high-end mainframes. All that really separated micros from the mini market was storage and memory capacity. Both of these began to be addressed through the later 1980s; 1 MB of RAM became typical by around 1987, desktop hard drives rapidly pushed past the 100 MB range by 1990, and the introduction of inexpensive and easily deployable local area network (LAN) systems provided solutions for those looking for multi-user systems. The introduction of

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2730-435: The original design was retroactively renamed Argus 200 . The Argus 200 model would eventually sell 63 machines, and the 100 14. The design of the Argus 300 was started in 1963, with the first delivery in 1965. This was a much faster machine featuring a fully parallel-architecture arithmetic logic unit , as opposed to the earlier and much slower serial units. Its instruction set was nevertheless fully compatible with

2795-474: The original, the Argus 100 used a flat 24-bit addressing scheme with both data and code stored in a single memory. A smaller 5-bit opcode was used in order to simplify the basic logic and gain an address bit. The single ALU and other changes resulted in a basic operation time of 72 μs. One notable use of the Argus 100 was to control the Jodrell Bank Mark II telescope in 1964. With the 100's release,

2860-652: The primary contractors, Ferranti and Bristol Aerospace , led to the idea of combining components of the Blue Envoy with the existing Bristol Bloodhound to produce a much more capable design. This produced the Bloodhound Mark II, roughly doubling the range to about 75 miles (121 km) and using the new radar systems from the Envoy which allowed the missile to track targets much closer to the ground whilst also much more resistant to radar jamming. Unlike Blue Envoy, Bloodhound

2925-467: The same packages, and also wire-wrap, on larger boards, but later versions employed dual-in-line ICs which were soldered flat onto the PCB and were much easier to remove. Like the earlier designs, the 400 and 500 used the same 14-bit address space and 24-bit instruction set and were compatible. The 500 added new instructions that used three-bits of the accumulator for offset indexing as well. Both machines ran at

2990-446: The same time, minis began to move upward in size. Although several 24 and 32-bit minis had entered the market earlier, it was DEC's 1977 VAX , which they referred to as a superminicomputer , or supermini, that caused the mini market to move en-masse to 32-bit architectures. This provided ample headroom even as single-chip 16-bit microprocessors like the TMS 9900 and Zilog Z8000 appeared in

3055-465: The software context, the relatively simple OSs for early microcomputers were usually inspired by minicomputer OSs (such as CP/M 's similarity to Digital's single user OS/8 and RT-11 and multi-user RSTS time-sharing system). Also, the multiuser OSs of today are often either inspired by, or directly descended from, minicomputer OSs. UNIX was originally a minicomputer OS, while the Windows NT kernel ,

3120-492: The target. The illuminator and missiles would not necessarily be close together, complicating the calculations. Further, the receiver had to filter out signals that were not of the expected Doppler shifted frequency range, so the computer also had to calculate the expected frequency shift to set the receiver's filters. The accuracy required of the calculations was beyond the capability of small military computers used to that point. An experimental system by Derek Whitehead using

3185-539: The term "first minicomputer". Most computing histories point to the 1964 introduction of Digital Equipment Corporation 's (DEC) 12-bit PDP-8 as the first minicomputer. Some of this is no doubt due to DEC's widespread use of the term starting in the mid-1960s. Smaller systems, including those from DEC like the PDP-5 and LINC , had existed prior to this point, but it was the PDP-8 combination of small size, general purpose orientation and low price that puts it firmly within

3250-403: The time, microcomputers were 8-bit single-user, relatively simple machines running simple program-launcher operating systems like CP/M or MS-DOS , while minis were much more powerful systems that ran full multi-user, multitasking operating systems, such as VMS and Unix . The Tandem Computers NonStop product line shipped its first fully fault-tolerant cluster computer in 1976. Around

3315-464: The two-decade lifetime of the minicomputer class (1965–1985), almost 100 companies formed and only a half dozen remained. When single-chip CPU microprocessors appeared, beginning with the Intel 4004 in 1971, the term "minicomputer" came to mean a machine that lies in the middle range of the computing spectrum, in between the smallest mainframe computers and the microcomputers . The term "minicomputer"

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3380-501: The ubiquitous Teletype Model 33 ASR. They usually took up one or a few 19-inch rack cabinets, compared with the large mainframes that could fill a room. In terms of relative computing power compared to contemporary mainframes, small systems that were similar to minicomputers had been available from the 1950s. In particular, there was an entire class of drum machines , like the UNIVAC 1101 and LGP-30 , that share some features of

3445-500: The world however used 0 volts to represent 0 and + 2.4 (to 5) volts to represent 1. This was called NAND logic. They are in fact both the same circuitry. When Texas Instruments brought out their “74” series of integrated circuits the specification of MicroNOR II was changed from 4.5 volts to 5 volts so the two families could work together. The machine was packaged to fit into a standard Air Transport Rack . Multilayer PCBs were not routine in 1963 and Ferranti developed processes for bonding

3510-463: Was "the world’s first commercially produced minicomputer". It meets most definitions of "mini" in terms of power and size, but was designed and built to be used as an instrumentation system in labs, not as a general-purpose computer. Many similar examples of small special-purpose machines exist from the early 1960s, including the UK Ferranti Argus and Soviet UM-1NKh. The CDC 160 , circa 1960,

3575-485: Was a flop in the market and disappeared after almost no sales. The company then attempted to enter the workstation and server markets with the DEC Alpha , but was too late to save the company and they eventually sold their remains to Compaq in 1998. By the end of the decade all of the classic vendors were gone; Data General , Prime , Computervision , Honeywell , and Wang , failed, merged, or were bought out. Today, only

3640-539: Was also used as a production control platform for companies such as Kodak . The Argus 700 could be configured in shared memory multi-processor configurations. The Argus 700E was a low-end model. The Argus 700F used 500 ns cycle time MOS memory of up to 64k 16-bit words. The Argus 700G supported a virtual address space with up to 256k words of memory. The Argus 700S had the option of faster 150 ns bipolar memory with independent access for input-output processors. The Argus 700 also played an important historical role in

3705-477: Was assigned the next year, keeping with the Ferranti tradition of using Greek names for their computers. They selected Argus as this was the all-seeing god, appropriate for a machine that would be tasked with controlling complex systems. The new system had a number of differences from the hearing aid machine. Among these was the introduction of interrupts to better handle timing of various events. The earlier machine

3770-504: Was based on germanium transistors with 0 and -6 volts representing binary 1 and 0, respectively. The computer was based on a 12-bit word length with 24-bit instructions. The arithmetic was handled in two parallel 6-bit ALUs operating at 500 kHz. Additions in the ALU took 12 μs, but adding in the memory access time meant simple instructions took about 20 μs. Double-length (24-bit) arithmetic operations were also provided. Data memory

3835-420: Was expected to be able to see the target through the entire attack. Guidance was semi-active radar homing , with an illuminator radar lighting up the targets, and a receiver in the missile using the reflected signal to track. For this to work, the illuminator had to be pointed at the target using information from a separate tactical control radar , and the receiver in the nose of the missile had to be pointed at

3900-501: Was for Police Command and Control installations, one of the more famous ones being for Strathclyde Police in Glasgow. This system provided the first visual display of resource locations using maps provided by 35mm slide projectors projecting through a port-hole in the tube of the VDU screen. An Argus 400 replaced the 100 at Jodrell Bank in 1971. There was a special version of the Argus 400 made for

3965-428: Was much faster. It was designed to be plugged into a larger 19 inch rack mounted frame, together with up to four core store (memory) units. The Argus 400 was repackaged to be the same as the Argus 500 and the two machines were plug compatible . The Argus 400 used 18 small PCBs for its CPU each of which was wire-wrapped to the backplane using 70 miniature wire wraps. Removing a card was tedious. The Argus 500 initially used

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4030-524: Was not long before this market also began to come under threat; the Motorola 68000 offered a significant percentage of the performance of a typical mini in a desktop platform. True 32-bit processors like the National Semiconductor NS32016 , Motorola 68020 and Intel 80386 soon followed. By the mid-1980s, high-end microcomputers offered CPU performance equal to low-end and mid-range minis, and

4095-417: Was re-ported from MIPS processors to Itanium-based processors branded as ' HP Integrity NonStop Servers'. As in the earlier migration from stack machines to MIPS microprocessors, all customer software was carried forward without source changes. Integrity NonStop continues to be HP's answer for the extreme scaling needs of its very largest customers. The NSK operating system, now termed NonStop OS , continues as

4160-446: Was so slow that these sorts of issues were dealt with simply by checking every physical input in a loop, but with the much faster performance of the new design this was no longer appropriate as most of the tests would reveal no changes and thus be wasted. These sorts of tasks were now controlled by interrupts, so the device could indicate when its data was ready to be processed. The system added core memory for temporary storage, replacing

4225-450: Was supplied in a 12-bit, 4096 word, core memory store, while up to 64 instruction words were stored in a separate plugboard tray then 8 trays to a box and 4 boxes in a rack giving 2048 lines of program, using ferrite pegs dropped into holes to create a "1". Opcodes were 6 bits, registers 3 bits, index register (modifier) 2 bits and data address 13 bits. Shortly after the cancellation of the Blue Envoy in 1957, an emergency meeting between

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