On Wed, 2004-03-03 at 08:44, Chris Green wrote:
When I was at University the 'mainframe' was an Elliot 503 on which we could try our hand at programming. My brother-in-law (who is a few years older than me) was at Elliot Automation in Borehamwood involved in the design of the 503 and 803, he then went on to work at English Electric in Stoke on Trent.
The 503 was a parallel machine, where as the 803 was a serial machine, so the 503 ran a lot faster !
But Elliotts never managed to produce an operating system for the 503 so it was only ever used as a turbo-charged 803 I think.
I started programming as a job around 1970 on what were then called timesharing systems to which one connected via a 300 baud modem and all I/O was on teletypes or similar. Those new fangled VDUs were just appearing.
If anyone wants to play with the 803 emulator I'll put the source code up on my web site, but be warned, there is NO documentation, so unless you actually used an 803 you won't get very far with it ! Also the code is rather ugly !
Peter.