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                       The Elliott 903
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The Elliott 903 was manufactured by Elliott Automation Limited from
1965 as a desk-sized successor to the military computers 920B (in
Nimrod Mark I) and 920M (in RAF Jaguars and in tanks). It had an 18-bit
word ferrite core store with a 6 microsecond cycle time, paper tape I/O
and a Teletype. Up to 64K words of store could be fitted in units of
8K. The 905 was a later faster machine which could have 128K words of 
store.

The machine used transistors on plug-in packages. Peripherals could
include a plotter, a line printer, magnetic tapes, industrial
interfaces, and displays for plant monitoring. There was no disk to act
as a focus for an operating system, although one based on magnetic tape
was written and several for real-time applications.

Counting the military versions probably about 1000 machines were sold.
The 903 itself was used in process control, for running laboratory
equipment in hospitals and elsewhere, and for teaching programming in
schools. Languages available included Algol, Basic, Coral, Fortran and
the SIR assembler. This emulator has Algol although it can also be run
with SIR programs.


The emulator of the Elliott 903 included here is:

SIM900AL.ZIP    by Terry Froggatt and Don Hunter
                (don@gnhunter.demon.co.uk)


DGNH [ed CPB]  19-MAY-1996

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