The Iris 50 computer is one of the computers marketed by the French company
CII as part of
plan Calcul
Plan Calcul was a French governmental program to promote a national or European computer industry and associated research and education activities.
The plan was approved in July 1966 by President Charles de Gaulle, in the aftermath of two key even ...
at the end of the 1960s. Designed for the civilian market, it was produced from 1968 to 1975 and was the successor to the
CII 10070
The CII 10070 is a discontinued computer system from the French company CII. It was part of the first series of computers manufactured in the late 1960s under Plan Calcul.
The 10070 is a rebadged Scientific Data Systems (SDS) Sigma 7. In additio ...
(
SDS Sigma 7
The SDS Sigma series is a series of third generation computers that were introduced by Scientific Data Systems of the United States in 1966.
The first machines in the series are the 16-bit Sigma 2 and the 32-bit Sigma 7; the Sigma 7 was the firs ...
).
Its main competitor in Europe was the
IBM 360/50, which, like the Iris 50, was a universal 32 bits mainframe suitable for both business and scientific applications.
At the same time that the CII was building the Iris 50, it had to study military variants for the army called P0M, P2M, and P2MS.
The Iris 35 M version, used in particular to process the information needed to fire the
Pluton missile
The Pluton missile was a French nuclear-armed tactical ballistic missile (short-range ballistic missile, SRBM) system launched from a transporter erector launcher (TEL) platform mounted on an AMX-30 tank chassis. It was designed to provide the tac ...
, had a magnetic core memory made up of elements of 16 kilobytes each; tolerant of severe environmental conditions. Its main peripherals were a printer, a
monitor
Monitor or monitor may refer to:
Places
* Monitor, Alberta
* Monitor, Indiana, town in the United States
* Monitor, Kentucky
* Monitor, Oregon, unincorporated community in the United States
* Monitor, Washington
* Monitor, Logan County, West Vir ...
, and
modem
A modulator-demodulator or modem is a computer hardware device that converts data from a digital format into a format suitable for an analog transmission medium such as telephone or radio. A modem transmits data by Modulation#Digital modulati ...
s.
CII concluded that it was impossible to create another CPU compatible with Iris 50. It then decided to adopt the
Sigma 9 architecture, inspired by the Sigma 7 and marketed by (SETI), one of the three companies that had merged in 1966 to create CII.
The operating system for the Iris 50 was Siris 7, designed and developed by CII.
Its successor, the
Iris 80
Iris most often refers to:
*Iris (anatomy), part of the eye
*Iris (mythology), a Greek goddess
* ''Iris'' (plant), a genus of flowering plants
* Iris (color), an ambiguous color term
Iris or IRIS may also refer to:
Arts and media
Fictional ent ...
, was considerably transformed and improved, both in terms of the components, which moved from
DTL to
TTL,
and the operating system (
Siris 7/8) on which the
IRIA researchers worked to increase its speed.
A slower-speed version, the Iris 45, was introduced in 1972.
References
External links
Technical specifications and illustrations of the Iris 50 (Fédération des Equipes Bull)
Mainframe computers
History of computing in France
Computers designed in France
32-bit computers
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