GEC 4000 series: Difference between revisions

Content deleted Content added

Inline

Revision as of 15:19, 7 July 2007

The GEC 4000 was a series of 16/32-bit minicomputers produced by GEC Computers Ltd. of the UK during the 1970s and 1980s.

Users of GEC 4000 series systems included several British universities, the JANET academic/research network, Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory, British Steel real-time control of rolling steel mills, British Rail and London Underground for real-time train scheduling, London Fire Brigade and Durham Fire Brigade command and control systems, and most of the National Videotex systems in the world including the Prestel viewdata service. A GEC 4080M was also used as the central processor for the radar system of the ill-fated Nimrod AEW.3 airborne early warning aircraft.

A number of variants of the GEC 4000 processor were produced, including:

4080: original 1973 model with up to 64 KiB of core memory
4082: 4080 with up to 1 MiB of memory
4070: entry-level model without memory interleaving
4085: 4082 with semiconductor memory
4060: entry-level model based on AMD Am2900 bit-slice processors
4062/4065: 4060 supporting up to 1 MiB memory
4080M: compact ruggedized 4080 for military applications
4090: Am2900-based with 32-bit addressing extensions and up to 4 MiB of memory
4190: revised 4090 with up to 16 MiB memory
4180: cheaper, slower version of the 4190
4060M: compact ruggedized 4060 for military applications
4160: 4060 with 4090 instruction set extensions
4150: desktop 4160
4162: 4160 with additional communications controllers
4195: compact 4190
4185: cheaper, slower version of the 4195
4151: rackmount 4150
4190D: dual-processor 4190
4193: 4195 with SCSI adaptor
4220: gate array processor implementation
4310: Motorola MVME187-based system emulating a GEC 4000

Several operating systems were available for the GEC 4000 series, including the following:

COS: Core Operating System, for diskless real-time systems
DOS: Disk Operating System, for real-time systems, providing a filesystem and swapping facilities
OS4000: a multi-user system supporting batch and interactive use, and transaction processing

Programming languages available included BABBAGE (a high-level assembly language), FORTRAN IV, CORAL 66, ALGOL and BASIC.

This computing article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
 The '''GEC 4000''' was a series of [[16-bit|16]]/[[32-bit]] [[minicomputers]] produced by [[GEC]] Computers Ltd. of the [[United Kingdom|UK]] during the 1970s and 1980s.
-Users of GEC 4000 series systems included several British universities, the [[JANET]] academic/research network, [[Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory]] and the [[Prestel]] [[viewdata]] service. A GEC 4080M was also used as the central processor for the radar system of the ill-fated [[Hawker-Siddeley Nimrod|Nimrod AEW.3]] [[airborne early warning]] aircraft.
+Users of GEC 4000 series systems included several British universities, the [[JANET]] academic/research network, [[Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory]], [[British Steel]] real-time control of rolling steel mills, [[British Rail]] and [[London Underground]] for real-time train scheduling, [[London Fire Brigade]] and Durham Fire Brigade command and control systems, and most of the National [[Videotex]] systems in the world including the [[Prestel]] [[viewdata]] service. A GEC 4080M was also used as the central processor for the radar system of the ill-fated [[Hawker-Siddeley Nimrod|Nimrod AEW.3]] [[airborne early warning]] aircraft.
 == Models ==