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Honeywell 800


The Datamatic Division of Honeywell 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 the Datamatic 1000, which was a joint Honeywell and Raytheon project started in 1955. The 1800 and 1800-II were follow-on designs to the H-800.

The basic unit of data was a word of 48 bits. This could be divided in several ways:

The basic system had:

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.

Available software included:

Jane King, William A. Shelly, "A Family History of Honeywell's Large-Scale Computer Systems," IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 42–46, Oct.-Dec. 1997, doi:10.1109/85.627898



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