Ferranti-Packard 6000
   HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

The FP-6000Ferranti Packard: Pioneers in Canadian Electrical Manufacturing Norman R Ball, John N Vardalas was a second-generation
mainframe A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterpris ...
computer developed and built by Ferranti-Packard, the Canadian division of
Ferranti Ferranti International PLC or simply Ferranti was a UK-based electrical engineering and equipment firm that operated for over a century, from 1885 until its bankruptcy in 1993. At its peak, Ferranti was a significant player in power grid system ...
, in the early 1960s. It is particularly notable for supporting multitasking, being one of the first commercial machines to do so. Only six FP-6000s were sold before the computer division of Ferranti-Packard was sold off by Ferranti's UK headquarters in 1963, the FP-6000 becoming the basis for the mid-range machines of the ICT 1900, which sold into the thousands in Europe.


Background

What was to become the FP-6000 had its genesis in a
Royal Canadian Navy The Royal Canadian Navy (RCN; , ''MRC'') is the Navy, naval force of Canada. The navy is one of three environmental commands within the Canadian Armed Forces. As of February 2024, the RCN operates 12 s, 12 s, 4 s, 4 s, 8 s, and several auxiliary ...
project starting in 1949 called DATAR. For DATAR, Ferranti-Packard (then still known as Ferranti Canada) built an experimental computer to share information among ships in a convoy. Although the prototype was a success, the failure rate of the
vacuum tube A vacuum tube, electron tube, thermionic valve (British usage), or tube (North America) is a device that controls electric current flow in a high vacuum between electrodes to which an electric voltage, potential difference has been applied. It ...
s was a concern to everyone and Ferranti suggested they re-build the machine using
transistor A transistor is a semiconductor device used to Electronic amplifier, amplify or electronic switch, switch electrical signals and electric power, power. It is one of the basic building blocks of modern electronics. It is composed of semicondu ...
s instead. DATAR ran out of funds before this conversion could take place, but Ferranti put the experience to good use in a series of one-off transistorized machines. One such example was a cheque sorting system built for the
Federal Reserve Bank A Federal Reserve Bank is a regional bank of the Federal Reserve System, the central banking system of the United States. There are twelve in total, one for each of the twelve Federal Reserve Districts that were created by the Federal Reserve A ...
, itself a modification of a system developed to sort mail for the Canadian Post Office. The developmental series eventually culminated in ReserVec. ReserVec was the first computerized reservation system to enter service when it took over all bookings for
Air Canada Air Canada is the flag carrier and the largest airline of Canada, by size and passengers carried. Air Canada is headquartered in the borough of Saint-Laurent in the city of Montreal. The airline, founded in 1937, provides scheduled and cha ...
in 1961. Ferranti initially had high hopes for the machine, thinking that it would be successful in Europe if sold by the UK headquarters' sales staff. As had happened many times in the past, however, the UK computer team suffered from a terminal case of not invented here, and decided it was better if they designed their own instead. Their project was never delivered, and ReserVec withered. Ferranti-Packard was unwilling to simply let the development effort go to waste, and started looking for ways to commercialize the ReserVec hardware into a general purpose mainframe. Ferranti-Packard needed a launch customer to ensure at least one sale, and approached the Federal Reserve Bank again, offering a greatly expanded and more flexible system to replace the earlier custom-wired machine they had delivered only a few years earlier in 1958.


Concept

During the late 1950s, Ferranti's UK computer development department was heavily involved in the development of computer circuitry based on the use of
magnetic amplifier The magnetic amplifier (colloquially known as a "mag amp") is an electromagnetism, electromagnetic device for amplifying electrical signals. The magnetic amplifier was invented early in the 20th century, and was used as an alternative to vacuum ...
s. These were a 1950s replacement for
transistor A transistor is a semiconductor device used to Electronic amplifier, amplify or electronic switch, switch electrical signals and electric power, power. It is one of the basic building blocks of modern electronics. It is composed of semicondu ...
s; at that time transistors were extremely expensive and still had reliability issues. Magnetic amplifiers were larger than transistors but had the advantage of allowing a single amplifier to be shared among several circuits, lowering component counts. When newer transistors were introduced at lower price points, interest in magnetic amplifiers disappeared almost overnight. Ken Johnson, an engineer at Ferranti's computer division in Manchester, noticed that it would be possible to wire these new transistors in the same way as the magnetic amplifiers, thereby reusing a single transistor for several tasks, and in turn, greatly lowering component costs. It appeared this concept, which he called "neuron" due to its multi-input/multi-output wiring being similar to the brain's
neuron A neuron (American English), neurone (British English), or nerve cell, is an membrane potential#Cell excitability, excitable cell (biology), cell that fires electric signals called action potentials across a neural network (biology), neural net ...
s, would allow Ferranti to build computers at lower price points than their competition. After the neuron concept was successful in a small test machine known as "Newt", in 1959 the company introduced two commercial machines based on neuron, one for the low-end and another midrange design. In 1960, the smaller design was delivered as the Ferranti Sirius, a desk-sized system for small businesses. It was an immediate success, undercutting the price of any similar design. The larger machine, the Ferranti Orion, was developed in parallel and formally announced in 1960 with the first unit shipping in 1961. A number of engineers from the Canadian office were sent to the UK to work on this machine. Orion ultimately demonstrated that the neuron concept simply didn't work at larger sizes, the electrical current needed to activate the switching was high enough that when pushed through the long wires of a large machine they produced noise in the circuits and no solution could be found to eliminate it. Orion was being positioned as Ferranti's main offering for the 1960s, and its failure threw the company's computer division into disarray. While this was taking place, a separate group within Ferranti was formed to consider a replacement for the successful tube-based Ferranti Pegasus. These efforts resulted in an autumn 1961 specification sometimes known as "Harriac" after the study group's manager, Harry Johnson. Harriac was essentially a transistorized Pegasus with more modern features, and as such, it would have fit into Ferranti's product line at about the same level as the Orion. After considerable internal debate, the company decided to produce a transistorized version of Orion, Orion 2, and Harriac was forgotten. As the Orion project broke down, the Canadian contingent returned to Canada and took Harriac with them. They decided to combine the Harriac specification with their own successful transistorized circuitry developed for ReserVec.


Design

A key feature of the Orion was what was then known as "
multiprogramming In computing, multitasking is the concurrent execution of multiple tasks (also known as processes) over a certain period of time. New tasks can interrupt already started ones before they finish, instead of waiting for them to end. As a result ...
", the ability to run multiple programs at once, rapidly switching between them to make it appear as if they were all running at the same time. The key problem in supporting multiprogramming was the need for programs to be loaded into different locations in memory. Without multiprogramming support, a program was normally loaded into the "base" of memory, its notional location zero. To provide the illusion of being at zero, in a multiprogramming machine each program was assigned a fixed amount of the core memory, its base location is known as the ''datum'' and the last location as the ''limit''. Every store operation by the CPU automatically offset the effective address by the datum for that program. In order to prevent fragmentation of memory, every time a program terminated, the FP-6000's
operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...
, known as ''Executive'', would temporarily stop the other programs and recopy them to the lowest available location in core. This way the available memory was always at the top. Although this technique eliminated the need for storing a list of memory blocks, it was at the cost of expensive copies every time a program ended. Though impractical when compared to modern operating system models, Executive's was typical of the time; the model for most was a sort of "extended batch mode," running long-lived programs that paused when not being actively fed data. The machine was also designed from the outset to allow it to scale across a wide variety of needs. The system included 64 hardware channels that could be connected to peripherals of any sort and could be supplied with a wide variety of core memory sizes. In other ways the machine was fairly similar to the ReserVec's Gemini machine, using a 24-bit word with a 25th-bit for parity checking and a simple
machine language In computer programming, machine code is computer code consisting of machine language instructions, which are used to control a computer's central processing unit (CPU). For conventional binary computers, machine code is the binaryOn nonb ...
. One change was the lack of a memory drum, as the advances in core allowed them to replace the drum entirely.


Sales

Development of the FP-6000 was completed in late 1962, and the first production machine was delivered to the Federal Reserve Bank in early 1963. The prototype machine was later greatly expanded into the largest FP-6000 installation and sold to Saskatchewan Power, the provincial electrical supply
crown corporation Crown corporation () is the term used in Canada for organizations that are structured like private companies, but are directly and wholly owned by the government. Crown corporations have a long-standing presence in the country, and have a sign ...
for use in performing both engineering calculations and customer billing simultaneously. From there, additional sales proved very difficult. Over the next year they sold one to the Defence Research Establishment Atlantic, in
Dartmouth, Nova Scotia Dartmouth ( ) (Scottish Gaelic, Scottish-Gaelic: Baile nan Loch) is a Urban area, built-up community of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Halifax Regional Municipality, Nova Scotia, Canada. Located on the eastern shore of Halifax Harbour, Dartmouth has 101 ...
and the other to the
Toronto Stock Exchange The Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX; ) is a stock exchange located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is the List of stock exchanges, 10th largest exchange in the world and the third largest in North America based on market capitalization. Based in th ...
(TSX). The later machine allowed the TSX to become the first computerized exchange a few years later. Sales attempts to the City of
Toronto Toronto ( , locally pronounced or ) is the List of the largest municipalities in Canada by population, most populous city in Canada. It is the capital city of the Provinces and territories of Canada, Canadian province of Ontario. With a p ...
to drive the world's first computerized traffic control system failed, as did a sale to Ontario's Treasury department. Sales by Ferranti UK were also non-existent. For years the Canadian division had to put up with not invented here problems and found their efforts continually blocked by the UK computer division's managers. It seemed that the FP-6000 was to suffer a similar fate, and the UK division had argued with the Canadian engineers about practically every part of the design. The real reason for the recalcitrance, in this case, would not become clear until later in the year. Ferranti had been supporting their UK computer division for over a decade at this point, but had failed to make any significant sales. Management was tired of the drain on company resources and decided to sell off the division entirely. They initially entered discussions with
International Computers and Tabulators International Computers and Tabulators or ICT was a British computer manufacturer, formed in 1959 by a merger of the British Tabulating Machine Company (BTM) and Powers-Samas. In 1963 it acquired the business computer divisions of Ferranti. It ...
in early 1963, but ICT looked at the continual losses and was less than interested. Ferranti then "sweetened" the deal by showing them the FP-6000, offering to include that in the deal if ICT bought the division. ICT was in the midst of re-designing its own series of low-end machines and had been considering licensing an
RCA RCA Corporation was a major American electronics company, which was founded in 1919 as the Radio Corporation of America. It was initially a patent pool, patent trust owned by General Electric (GE), Westinghouse Electric Corporation, Westinghou ...
IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...
-compatible design. However, the FP-6000 offered them a more attractive system that could be scaled with the addition of smaller and larger machines to produce an entire line. ICT was finally interested, as one Ferranti board member put it, ''"without the FP-6000 we would not have gotten the deal we wanted from ICT. The FP-6000 was the golden brick in the sale of our operations."'' The deal was announced in June 1963, to the surprise of the Canadian division. The FP-6000, with the addition of the ICT Standard Interface, became the ICT 1904, and a slightly modified version would be offered as the ICT 1905. The Canadian division offered to build both of these machines, which seemed obvious, as well as headquarters North American sales and marketing. However, ICT was interested only in the European market and declined on both offers. The entire hardware team resigned and formed an electronics company known as ESE, later purchased by
Motorola Motorola, Inc. () was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois. It was founded by brothers Paul and Joseph Galvin in 1928 and had been named Motorola since 1947. Many of Motorola's products had been ...
. They were soon followed by the software team, who formed I. P. Sharp Associates, a major Canadian programming firm of the 1970s and 80s. The team in charge of the system's storage devices left some time later in 1967 to form Teklogix. SaskPower ran their FP-6000 for 20 years before retiring it in 1982. The machine was donated to the Western Development Museum in 1983, and is the last remaining example.


References

*''ICL: A Business and Technical History'', M. Campbell-Kelly, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1989, , p. 221 * *


Bibliography

* *
Time-Sharing on the Ferranti-Packard FP6000 Computer System
{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071223124618/http://rogerdmoore.ca/JOUR/FP6KHWC.html , date=2007-12-23
The Ferranti Orion Computer SystemThe Ferranti Argus Computer System
Ferranti computers Mainframe computers Transistorized computers Computer-related introductions in 1963 24-bit computers