The Orion was a mid-range
mainframe computer
A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterpris ...
introduced by
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. The company was once a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index.
The firm was known ...
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
An atlas is a collection of maps; it is typically a bundle of maps of Earth or of a region of Earth.
Atlases have traditionally been bound into book form, but today many atlases are in multimedia formats. In addition to presenting geographic ...
and smaller systems like the
Sirius
Sirius is the list of brightest stars, brightest star in the night sky. Its name is derived from the Ancient Greek language, Greek word , or , meaning 'glowing' or 'scorching'. The star is designated α Canis Majoris, Latinisation ...
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 (the
KDF9
KDF9 was an early British 48-bit computer designed and built by English Electric (which in 1968 was merged into International Computers Limited (ICL)). The first machine came into service in 1964 and the last of 29 machines was decommissioned ...
being a contemporary).
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. Its failure was the capstone to a long series of losses for the Manchester labs, and with it, Ferranti management grew tired of the entire computer market. The division was sold to
International Computers and Tabulators
International Computers and Tabulators or ICT was a British computer manufacturer, formed in 1959 by a merger of the British Tabulating Machine Company (BTM) and Powers-Samas. In 1963 it acquired the business computer divisions of Ferranti. It ...
(ICT), who selected the Canadian
Ferranti-Packard 6000
The FP-6000Ferranti Packard: Pioneers in Canadian Electrical Manufacturing Norman R Ball, John N Vardalas
was a second-generation Mainframe computer, mainframe computer developed and built by Ferranti-Packard, the Canadian division of Ferranti, ...
as their mid-range offering, ending further sales of the Orion 2.
History
Magnetic amplifiers
During the 1950s
transistor
upright=1.4, gate (G), body (B), source (S) and drain (D) terminals. The gate is separated from the body by an insulating layer (pink).
A transistor is a semiconductor device used to Electronic amplifier, amplify or electronic switch, switch e ...
s were expensive and relatively fragile devices.
[Scarrott] Although they had advantages for computer designers, namely lower power requirements and their smaller physical packaging,
vacuum tube
A vacuum tube, electron tube, valve (British usage), or tube (North America), is a device that controls electric current flow in a high vacuum between electrodes to which an electric voltage, potential difference has been applied.
The type kn ...
s remained the primary logic device until the early 1960s. There was no lack of experimentation with other
solid state switching devices, however.
One such system was the
magnetic amplifier
The magnetic amplifier (colloquially known as a "mag amp") 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 wh ...
. Similar to
magnetic core memory
Magnetic-core memory was the predominant form of random-access computer memory for 20 years between about 1955 and 1975.
Such memory is often just called core memory, or, informally, core.
Core memory uses toroids (rings) of a hard magnetic ...
, or "cores", magnetic amplifiers used small
toroid
In mathematics, a toroid is a surface of revolution with a hole in the middle. The axis of revolution passes through the hole and so does not intersect the surface. For example, when a rectangle is rotated around an axis parallel to one of its ...
s 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. This field induced a current in a separate read circuit, creating an amplified output with a known current. Unlike digital logic based on tubes or transistors, which uses defined voltages to represent values, magnetic amplifiers based their logic values on defined current values.
[
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 used in binary adders,][ which could reduce the component count of the ALU considerably. This was known as "Ballot Box Logic" due to the way the inputs "voted" on the output. 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
The UNIVAC Solid State was a magnetic drum-based solid-state computer announced by Sperry Rand in December 1958 as a response to the IBM 650. It was one of the first computers to be (nearly) entirely solid-state, using 700 transistors, and 3000 m ...
(1959) and the mostly transistorized English Electric KDF9
KDF9 was an early British 48-bit computer designed and built by English Electric (which in 1968 was merged into International Computers Limited (ICL)). The first machine came into service in 1964 and the last of 29 machines was decommissioned ...
(1964).
Neuron
The Ferranti Computer Department in West Gorton
West or Occident is one of the four cardinal directions or points of the compass. It is the opposite direction from east and is the direction in which the Sun sets on the Earth.
Etymology
The word "west" is a Germanic word passed into some R ...
, Manchester
Manchester () is a city in Greater Manchester, England. It had a population of 552,000 in 2021. It is bordered by the Cheshire Plain to the south, the Pennines to the north and east, and the neighbouring city of Salford to the west. The t ...
had originally been set up as an industrial partner of Manchester University
, mottoeng = Knowledge, Wisdom, Humanity
, established = 2004 – University of Manchester Predecessor institutions: 1956 – UMIST (as university college; university 1994) 1904 – Victoria University of Manchester 1880 – Victoria Univer ...
's pioneering computer research lab, commercializing their Manchester Mark 1
The Manchester Mark 1 was one of the earliest stored-program computers, developed at the Victoria University of Manchester, England from the Manchester Baby (operational in June 1948). Work began in August 1948, and the first version was operat ...
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",][Hall] 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
Sirius is the list of brightest stars, brightest star in the night sky. Its name is derived from the Ancient Greek language, Greek word , or , meaning 'glowing' or 'scorching'. The star is designated α Canis Majoris, Latinisation ...
, 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 Atlas
An atlas is a collection of maps; it is typically a bundle of maps of Earth or of a region of Earth.
Atlases have traditionally been bound into book form, but today many atlases are in multimedia formats. In addition to presenting geographic ...
, 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 is a British multinational insurance company headquartered in London, England. It was founded in London in May 1848 to provide loans to professional and working people.
Prudential has dual primary listings on the London Stock E ...
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.][Ball & Vardalas]
pg. 254
/ref>
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 Bracknell
Bracknell () is a large town and civil parish in Berkshire, England, the westernmost area within the Greater London Built-up Area, Greater London Urban Area and the administrative centre of the Bracknell Forest, Borough of Bracknell Forest. It l ...
, 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 a conventional all-transistor design. They recommended using the "Griblons" circuits developed by Maurice Gribble at Ferranti's ]Wythenshawe
Wythenshawe () is a district of the city of Manchester, England. Historic counties of England, Historically in Cheshire, Wythenshawe was transferred in 1931 to the City of Manchester, which had begun building a massive housing estate there in the ...
plant, which they had used to successfully implement their Argus computer for the Bristol Bloodhound
The Bristol Bloodhound is a British ramjet powered surface-to-air missile developed during the 1950s. It served as the UK's main air defence weapon into the 1990s and was in large-scale service with the Royal Air Force (RAF) and the forces of f ...
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
Sebastian Pietro Innocenzo Adhemar Ziani de Ferranti (9 April 1864 – 13 January 1930) was a British electrical engineer and inventor.
Personal life
Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti was born in Liverpool, England. His Italian father, Cesare, was ...
, 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
Telegraphy is the long-distance transmission of messages where the sender uses symbolic codes, known to the recipient, rather than a physical exchange of an object bearing the message. Thus flag semaphore is a method of telegraphy, whereas p ...
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
Can may refer to:
Containers
* Aluminum can
* Drink can
* Oil can
* Steel and tin cans
* Trash can
* Petrol can
* Metal can (disambiguation)
Music
* Can (band), West Germany, 1968
** ''Can'' (album), 1979
* Can (South Korean band)
Other
* Can ...
to discuss their recent successes with their "Gemini" design, which was used in their ReserVec
ReserVec was a computerized reservation system developed by Ferranti Canada for Trans-Canada Airlines (TCA, today's Air Canada) in the late 1950s. It appears to be the first such system ever developed, predating the more famous SABRE system in ...
system. On November 2 the Bracknell team decided to adopt the Gemini circuitry for Orion 2.[See "SOME KEY DATES", ''Group'']
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.][''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 is the investigation or exercise of care that a reasonable business or person is normally expected to take before entering into an agreement or contract with another party or an act with a certain standard of care.
It can be a l ...
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 was a family of mainframe computers released by International Computers and Tabulators (ICT) and later International Computers Limited (ICL) during the 1960s and 1970s. The 1900 series was notable for being one of the few non-American ...
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
In computer architecture, 48-bit integers can represent 281,474,976,710,656 (248 or 2.814749767×1014) discrete values. This allows an unsigned binary integer range of 0 through 281,474,976,710,655 (248 − 1) or a signed two's complement ra ...
words of slow, 12μs, core memory
Core or cores may refer to:
Science and technology
* Core (anatomy), everything except the appendages
* Core (manufacturing), used in casting and molding
* Core (optical fiber), the signal-carrying portion of an optical fiber
* Core, the central ...
, 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 a 40-bit fraction and an 8-bit exponent. The system included built-in capabilities for working with ]Pound sterling
Sterling (abbreviation: stg; Other spelling styles, such as STG and Stg, are also seen. ISO code: GBP) is the currency of the United Kingdom and nine of its associated territories. The pound ( sign: £) is the main unit of sterling, and t ...
before decimalization. The core memory was backed by one or two magnetic drum
Drum memory was a magnetic data storage device invented by Gustav Tauschek in 1932 in Austria. Drums were widely used in the 1950s and into the 1960s as computer memory.
For many early computers, drum memory formed the main working memory ...
s with 16k words each.[''System'', pg. 18] Various offline input/output included magnetic disk
Magnetic storage or magnetic recording is the storage of data on a magnetized medium. Magnetic storage uses different patterns of magnetisation in a magnetizable material to store data and is a form of non-volatile memory. The information is ac ...
s, tape drive
A tape drive is a data storage device that reads and 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 a long archival stability.
...
s, punched card
A punched card (also punch card or punched-card) is a piece of stiff paper that holds digital data represented by the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions. Punched cards were once common in data processing applications or to di ...
s, punched tape
Five- and eight-hole punched paper tape
Paper tape reader on the Harwell computer with a small piece of five-hole tape connected in a circle – creating a physical program loop
Punched tape or perforated paper tape is a form of data storage ...
and printers.
Most of the Orion's instruction set
In computer science, an instruction set architecture (ISA), also called computer architecture, is an abstract model of a computer. A device that executes instructions described by that ISA, such as a central processing unit (CPU), is called an ' ...
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
In computing, time-sharing is the sharing of a computing resource among many users at the same time by means of multiprogramming and multi-tasking.DEC Timesharing (1965), by Peter Clark, The DEC Professional, Volume 1, Number 1
Its emergence a ...
. This was supported by a series of input/output
In computing, input/output (I/O, or informally io or IO) is the communication between an information processing system, such as a computer, and the outside world, possibly a human or another information processing system. Inputs are the signals ...
(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
Memory protection is a way to control memory access rights on a computer, and is a part of most modern instruction set architectures and operating systems. The main purpose of memory protection is to prevent a process from accessing memory that ha ...
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 LEO III of 1961, PLATO
Plato ( ; grc-gre, Πλάτων ; 428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC) was a Greek philosopher born in Athens during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. He founded the Platonist school of thought and the Academy, the first institution ...
in early 1961, CTSS later that year, and the English Electric KDF9
KDF9 was an early British 48-bit computer designed and built by English Electric (which in 1968 was merged into International Computers Limited (ICL)). The first machine came into service in 1964 and the last of 29 machines was decommissioned ...
and FP-6000 of 1964.
The Orion is also notable for the use of its own high-level business language, NEBULA
A nebula ('cloud' or 'fog' in Latin; pl. nebulae, nebulæ or nebulas) is a distinct luminescent part of interstellar medium, which can consist of ionized, neutral or molecular hydrogen and also cosmic dust. Nebulae are often star-forming regio ...
. Nebula was created because of Ferranti's perception that the COBOL
COBOL (; an acronym for "common business-oriented language") is a compiled English-like computer programming language designed for business use. It is an imperative, procedural and, since 2002, object-oriented language. COBOL is primarily us ...
standard of 1960 was not sufficiently powerful for their machines, notably as COBOL was developed in the context of decimal, character-oriented batch processing
Computerized batch processing is a method of running software programs called jobs in batches automatically. While users are required to submit the jobs, no other interaction by the user is required to process the batch. Batches may automatically ...
, while Orion was a binary word-oriented multiprogramming system. NEBULA adapted many of COBOL's basic concepts, adding new ones of their own.[A. Rousell]
"A progress report of NEBULA"
''The Computer Journal'', Volume 5 Number 3 (1962), pg. 162-163 NEBULA was later ported to the Atlas as well.
References
Notes
Bibliography
* (''System'')
"Ferranti Orion Computer System"
Ferranti, November 1960
* Norman Ball and John Vardalas
"Ferranti-Packard: Pioneers in Canadian Electrical Manufacturing"
McGill-Queen's Press, 1994
* Gordon Scarrott
''Computer Resurrection'', Number 12 (Summer 1995)
* Peter Hall
''Computer Resurrection'', Number 33 (Spring 2004)
* Maurice Gribble
''Computer Resurrection'', Number 20 (Summer 1998)
* (''Group'')
6 July 2004
* John Vardalas
, ''IEEE Annals of the History of Computing'', Volume 16 Number 2 (1994)
* Martin Campbell-Kelly, "ICL: A Business and Technical History", Clarendon Press, 1989
Further reading
Ferranti, 1961
"The Ferranti ORION Computer System"
contains numerous details and material on the Orion series
* Henry Goodman
''The Computer Bulletin'', Volume 5 Number 2 (September 1961)
{{refend
Early British computers
Orion
Magnetic logic computers
Mainframe computers
Transistorized computers
Computer-related introductions in 1961