1401 Competition
BACKGROUND:
Around 1950, the new UNIVAC had made inroads to major IBM customers, and also T. J. Jr. was stressing T. J. Sr. about getting into the
new field of electronic data processing, using vacuum tube based computers.
By 1955, IBM had largely replaced Remington Rand UNIVAC as the principle producer of computers,
About then, IBM issued a directive that all further computer designs would use transistors exclusively.
The IBM 1401 sold very well by any standard in the business computer market place.
Many other companies were also eager to get into the computer business
Intro Honeywell 200
Sorry I don't have hard numbers of the relative sales over intervals of time. (Some ex-IBMer had heard that IBM lost about 180
1401 system sales to the Honeywell 200 & Liberator.)
Oddly, the Honeywell 200 is not included in either
1961 BRL
(Ballistic Research Laboratories Survey of Domestic Electronic Digital Computing Systems" nor
the
1964 BRL
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeywell_200
IBM 1401 Software to fight the Honeywell 200
Milton.Nancy at verizon.net wrote
In three-character (18-bit) addressing
mode,
the low-order 15 bits are the address, and the high-order three
bits are
index register designators. Zero means no indexing, seven means
indirect. There was also a two-character (12-bit) addressing mode,
without indexing, and a four-character (24-bit) addressing mode
with 15
or 30 index registers (models 201-1 and 201-2 only). The address
format
was entirely different from the 1401 address format, so it was
impossible to run 1401 "binaries."
In addition to Easytran (Honeywell's Autocoder-to-Easycoder converter)
there was a "bridge" library to simulate infrequently-used 1401
instructions that didn't have direct H-200 counterparts. These were
entered by putting the processor in "trap" addressing mode. In this
mode, if an instruction begins with a character having both a word
mark
and an item mark, it is executed as a "change sequence mode"
instruction, which exchanges the program counter and the sequence
register. The trap handler than interprets the instruction. I don't
know which 1401 instructions were handled in this way.
I suspect the processor on the H-200 where I worked was a model
201, not
201-1 or 201-2, with less than 32k memory, because I never heard of
four-character addressing mode, or 15 index registers.
Don't knock the Honeywell 200
I live in Kent in England and have just turned 65 and between 1966 and 1969 I was a programmer on a Honeywell 200. It was the first computer that our company owned and the first one that I ever programmed. The assembler language was called Easycoder and that was a good description as it was incredibly easy for even a beginner like me to use. It is said that Honeywell did nothing original with the H200 as their primary target was the IBM 1401 market but whatever the origins of the design the H200 was a great machine in its own right. Of course, to beat the speed of the 1401 they had to push the hardware to the limit and that could cause problems. In particular the control registers, which were magnetic core memory, ran at four times the speed of normal core memory and could overheat if the room was a little too warm. We had a fully air-conditioned computer room but our computer's control memory actually burned out once and had to be replaced.
It appears that the 1401 architecture only had one punctuation bit, the word mark, whereas the H200 had two. The second bit, the item mark, was used to flag particular 1401 operation codes which had to be emulated by software routines, but of course we were a pure Honeywell site and didn't use it for that. Used in conjunction with the word mark it allowed us to define three level data structures in memory which could be intelligently manipulated by the machine code itself. That made the machine language as powerful as COBOL on a small scale.
I didn't understand your comments about difficulties with binary addresses on the H200. The H200 was equally capable of both binary and decimal arithmetic and we were quite used to using both within the same program. In those days we had our unique sterling currency, pounds shillings and pence, with twelve pence to the shilling and twenty shillings to the pound. It wasn't possible to do direct arithmetic with that currency so we converted all sterling amounts to pence as soon as they were read from a punched card and converted them back on output. It was just as easy to convert to binary pence and the binary calculations went faster than BCD ones, so we would often use binary arithmetic even though we were doing simple financial calculations. By 1968 I was using our original H200 with only 4k of memory to carry out twenty year projections of corporate pension funds. As the computer had only been bought to replace our old tabulating machinery, that was well beyond management's expectations.
I can relate to your comments about finding out what the undefined operations actually did. I also checked on the results of BCD arithmetic on non-BCD values and found practical uses for my discoveries. I also experimented with BCD arithmetic using overlapping fields, which was flagged as completely unpredictable in the instruction manual. This resulted in some very fast and compact but apparently meaningless arithmetic functions in some of my programs carrying out critical corporate tasks. One really had to squeeze every last ounce of processing power out of those early computers.
I can also relate to the practicality of variable word boundaries. Just for fun we wrote a very short program to keep doubling a number until it filled the whole of memory and then print it out. I have no precise idea exactly what power of two that four thousand digit number was now. In later years we moved to single-address register-based computers and it was just as well we had high level programming languages to shield us from the horrible code generated.
My main hobby has always been electronics and I have supported this very cheaply by acquiring old electronic office equipment from my company over the years. As a consequence I now still have over a thousand circuit boards from Honeywell equipment dated around 1969. Wondering what to do with them recently, I realised that I probably have enough to build a fair replica of a Honeywell 200! Therefore I am seriously researching the subject at present. Despite scouring the internet I can find no evidence that any H200 actually survived. I only have enough core memory for 2k bytes, so I will have to brush up my old programming skills, but 2k is plenty for us old hands and that was the basic size of the H200 originally marketed. I have tracked down some documentation to help me but I am surprised that there is so little on the internet about the H200, considering that it frightened IBM so much that they rushed into marketing the 360 earlier than planned.
...
LaFarr Responds to Rob Sanders - May 17, 2010
I am delighted to get your email--even if it took my somewhat uncomplimentary remark to prompt you to write. You are the only one I know who has Honeywell 200 experience.
...
You might remember Honeywell had an advertising campaign featuring photos of sculptures made from electrical components. The museum has several of the originals on display, in display cases.
I have quite a lot of respect for Honeywell's early computer efforts. I believe they originated the vacuum column buffering for tape drives, they pioneered using limited flexing of metal which doesn't require lubrication and has a long life--? I think they made a card reader using a lot of that technology?
When I reviewed my 1401 page I noticed I didn't mention what I believe was a major factor in the 1401 success: It had great peripherals. Their chain line printer was unequaled, their card reader-punce with it's 5 pocket output and 3000 card input hopper was outstanding. And their tape drives were lots better than anything we had at RCA.
I will stop for now, but there is lots we could discuss.
Honeywell also had a Honeywell 800.
This machine had a split personality.
It could be compatible with the 200 series byte orientated or a word machine. The tapes were the size of a Volkswagen wheel with three inch tapes. No inter-record gap. Fixed pre-formatted size records. Wrote on the odd records on the way out and the even blocks on the way back. Weird.
Epilog
Starting in 1924, and over about 30 years, T. J. Watson had positioned IBM as the dominate force in "unit record" accounting, punched cards, ... .
A Survey of Domestic Electronic Digital Computing Systems
BALLISTIC RESEARCH LABORATORIES - REPORT NO. 971 - DECEMBER 1955
"A Third Survey of Domestic Electronic Digital Computing Systems"
Report No. 1115, March 1961 - by Martin H. Weik,
Over about 8 years of availability (until replaced by the low end of the IBM 360 family) a total of about 13 thousand
were sold - making it an early or maybe the first "mass produced" computer.
Many of the computer products competed with the IBM 1401 - intentionally or accidentally. Probably the most successful
was the Honeywell 200 (sales brochure) with a conversion product called Liberator. Not all programs could be successfully
converted - but enough to cause justified excitement in IBM. To counter the enhanced concurrent input - compute - output of the
Honeywell 200, (and many others), IBM introduced the OVERLAP capability - not very slick but helped keep sales up - until the
introduction of the IBM 360 series caused excitement at Honeywell ;-)) - Datamation Aug 1965 image from Dag Spicer
1 page ad
" My IBM Captivator software that stymied Honeywell 200 Liberator conversions
of IBM programs. It was a card box full of subroutines that could be used
by Autocoder programmers for many functions. Honeywell's Liberator software
could not handle these subroutines. Thus, a number of IBM 1401s stayed on
rent in the face of H 200 competition."
I found my H-200 programming manual, Honeywell document DSI-214A (H-200 only, not 200-1200-2200).
Can be found here - 21 Megabyte .pdf file
e-mail to LaFarr Stuart from Rob Sanders
May 16, 2010
I was searching the internet for information about the Honeywell 200 and decided to change tack and try looking up the opposition, the IBM 1401. This led me to
your website
[and 1401]. Thanks for the interesting webpage on that subject, but don't be so hard on the H200. Let me introduce myself.
Honeywell 200 via the 800 from Stan Paddock, May 18, 2010
As you might have deduce from my web page about the 1401, I have no hands on experience with the Honeywell 200. However, I worked for RCA from 1963 through 1968 at their home office for data processing in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. While there I did run lots of test 1401 programs of potential customers through our 1401 emulators and simulators. At least one had been to Honeywell before they came to us, and our emulator stopped on a multi-punched Honeywell 200 control card in their deck. I saw the rounded corner card (At RCA we never used the newer round corner cards because our stupid card reader couldn't handle them!) so I pulled the round corner card from the output hopper and said to the customer, "It doesn't like that card". The potential customer seemed embarrassed an recognized it as a Honeywell control card. Fortunately, it messed up his stop watch timing and we went on--I suspect the H-200 would have been faster. I know Honeywell had a very fast sort. That is the sum of my H-200 experience, but I did have an instruction manual which I looked over.
Between 1969 and 1975 I worked for Honeywell. I have used the Honeywell 200, 1200 and 2000.
Ten years after the 1401, IBM had clearly won the battle for business data processing. Twenty years later,
niche markets of note were
low and high end scientific (DEC and CDC), and timesharing. IBM could afford to be a little arrogant ;-))
- this was their decade - Then the current cheap microprocessor, semi-conductor memory and
reliable hard drives allowed "rest of us" to own computers.)
from August 1978 Datamation page 44, courtesy Dag Spicer
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