"David T Darnell" <[log in to unmask]> wrote in message
news:a5it8k0n7c@enews4.newsguy.com...
> OK, maybe I've been reading way to much of this list's posts, but for two
> nights now I have had a dream wherein a person is explaining that their
> strategy is to use "some of these old 6-bit machines" and that they work
> great for mundane task like printing and other "utility" tasks.  Then they
> point to one and it's black (or dark brown) and tan colored. It's about
the
> width of an EIA 19" rack and stands about waist high. They say this is
> starting to get popular.
>
> Well, maybe someone posted something about a 6-bit machine, or maybe not.
> Was there ever such an animal?

Me - the Singer System Ten. Built by Singer, the sewing machine people
(believe it or not) for real-time PoS control in a retail chain - Sears,
maybe.

Sold as a business machine too, into the bottom end of the market that might
have bought HP3000s. Later taken over by ICL of the UK.

Great little machines. I had one of the biggest(!) in the UK, maxed out at
120k of memory - 10 x 10k user partitions, designed to be one per user, and
20k of 'common' memory. And it had 120mB of disk memory too - 12 10mB
drives, each one the 'washing machine' size of an HP3000 Series III 120mB
drive. Unbuffered too - you wanted the data, you waited the latency!

Users had terminals, 80 characters, 24 lines. All interactive input, except
for the Xmas rush, where we had every punch bureau in the area raising
80-column cards to augment the regular data entry people with a card
reader.(But, hey, we fixed the errors interactively still). Just one central
printer, but it had pretty comprehensive spooling.

We wrote our own extended OS for it, so up to two users could share a
partition (wow!), and our own query language. It had RPG, but that was a
memory hog, and its macro-assembler was far better attuned to its memory
capabilities. No database, but its file system could support ISAM files, and
also Relative and Direct. Direct was keyed access, just like Image master
files, except the Ten had a better re-use algorithm than Image, so there was
none of this migrating secondary nonsense.

We implemented chain handling in the Relative files, all explicitly
controlled, so we had data structures that any Image user would be right at
home with. And all this before I'd ever seen Image.....

You could get packages for the Ten, but nobody was using it like we were, so
we rolled our own everywhere. The company was Hornby Hobbies, makers of
Hornby trains and Scalextric slot racing cars, so the system was called
MODELS - Manufacturing, Order Processing, Despatch, Enquiries, Ledgers,
Stock.

Best damn system I ever worked on, bar none, despite the hardware
limitations, thanks to the IT team there. A systems programmer who knew more
about making that box sing than most of the manufacturer's gurus. You ever
see a sales team *applaud* new stationery? I had a business analyst who
achieved that, and the rest of the good fit of box to business was down to
him too. We were doing $25m sales a year on it, soup to nuts.

Imagine what we could have done with an HP3000 - 16 bits, COBOL, Image, MPE,
lashings of memory and disc, distributed printers....

Oh yeah - it was dark brown and tan. Later orange, under ICL. 19" rack
width, but more like head height. Ours was, anyway....

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