The Datamatic Division of

Honeywell Honeywell International Inc. is an American publicly traded, multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. It primarily operates in four areas of business: aerospace, building technologies, performance ma ...

announced the H-800 electronic computer in 1958. The first installation occurred in 1960. A total of 89 were delivered. The H-800 design was part of a family of 48-bit word, three-address instruction format computers that descended from th
Datamatic 1000
which was a joint Honeywell and

Raytheon Raytheon Technologies Corporation is an American multinational aerospace and defense conglomerate headquartered in Arlington, Virginia. It is one of the largest aerospace and defense manufacturers in the world by revenue and market capitaliza ...

project started in 1955. The 1800 and 1800-II were follow-on designs to the H-800.Mark Smotherma
Paper about the Honeywell 800
/ref>

Data

The basic unit of data was a

word A word is a basic element of language that carries an semantics, objective or pragmatics, practical semantics, meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of w ...

of 48

bit The bit is the most basic unit of information in computing and digital communications. The name is a portmanteau of binary digit. The bit represents a logical state with one of two possible values. These values are most commonly represente ...

s. This could be divided in several ways: * 8

Alphanumeric Alphanumericals or alphanumeric characters are a combination of alphabetical and numerical characters. More specifically, they are the collection of Latin letters and Arabic digits. An alphanumeric code is an identifier made of alphanumeric ch ...

characters of 6 bits each * 12

Hexadecimal In mathematics and computing, the hexadecimal (also base-16 or simply hex) numeral system is a positional numeral system that represents numbers using a radix (base) of 16. Unlike the decimal system representing numbers using 10 symbols, hexa ...

or Decimal characters of 4 bits each * 16

Octal The octal numeral system, or oct for short, is the radix, base-8 number system, and uses the Numerical digit, digits 0 to 7. This is to say that 10octal represents eight and 100octal represents sixty-four. However, English, like most languages, ...

characters of 3 bits each * An instruction with four components of 12 bits each: the operation to be performed, and three memory addresses.

Hardware

The Honeywell 800 was a transistorized computer with core memory. Its processor used around 6000 discrete transistors and around 30,000 solid-state diodes.Eldon C. Hall, ''Journey to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Guidance Computer'',AIAA, 1996, , page 32 The basic system had: * A Central Processor with 16 controlled input/output trunks * An Input/Output Control Center (IOCC) with control functions for: ** A card reader/punch, ** A high-speed printer ** Up to 4 magnetic tape units * A Control Memory of 256 special registers of 16 bits each * A Main memory containing 4 banks of 2048 words. Extra peripherals could be added running through additional controllers with a theoretical possibility of 56 tape units. Up to 12 more main memory banks could be added. A random access disc system with a capacity of 800 million alphanumeric characters could be added. Multiprogram control allowed up to 8 programs to be sharing the machine, each with its own set of 32 special registers. A Floating-Point Unit was optionally available. The 48 bit word allowed a seven bit exponent and 40 bit mantissa. So numbers between 10⁻⁷⁸ and 10⁺⁷⁶ were possible and precision was 12 decimal places. If the customer did not buy the floating point unit, then floating point commands were implemented by software simulation. Peripheral devices included: high-density magnetic tapes, high-speed line printers, fast card and paper tape readers and punches to high-capacity random access magnetic disc memories, optical scanners, self-correcting orthoscanners and data communications devices.Company Sales Manual for the Honeywell 1800
/ref>

Software

Available software included: * ARGUS (Automatic Routine Generating and Updating System), an

assembly language In computer programming, assembly language (or assembler language, or symbolic machine code), often referred to simply as Assembly and commonly abbreviated as ASM or asm, is any low-level programming language with a very strong correspondence be ...

. * FACT (Fully Automatic Compiling Technique), a business

compiler In computing, a compiler is a computer program that translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primarily used for programs that ...

. * PERT (

Program Evaluation and Review Technique The program evaluation and review technique (PERT) is a statistical tool used in project management, which was designed to analyze and represent the tasks involved in completing a given project. First developed by the United States Navy in ...

), a project management system. * COP (Computer Optimization Package), a program testing system. *

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 ...

(COmmon Business Oriented Language), a compiler for the well known business programming language. * FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator), a compiler, runtime package, and "load and go" OS for the scientific language

References

External links

Company Sales Manual for the Honeywell 1800

Honeywell 800 a superior scientific computer

A Family History of Honeywell's Large-Scale Computer Systems

* ttp://www.quadibloc.com/comp/cp0303.htm Real Machines with 24-bit and 48-bit words* ttp://www.yourdictionary.com/computer/Honeywell www.yourdictionary.com Honeywell {{Honeywell Honeywell mainframe computers Transistorized computers Computer-related introductions in 1960

Data

Hardware

Software

References

Further reading

External links