NCR Century 100

NCR Century 100 Logo

The NCR Century 100 was NCR's first all integrated circuit computer. All logic gates were created by wire-wrapping nand gates together to form flip-flops and other complex circuits. The console of the system had only 18 lights and switches and allowed entry of a boot routine, or changes to loaded programs or data in memory. A typewriter console was also available.

Peripherals

The 615-100 Series integrated a complete data processing system had 16KB or 32KB of short rod memory, 80-column card reader or paper tape reader, two 5MB removable disc drives, 600-line per minute printer. The system could be provided with a punched paper tape reader, or an external card reader/punch, and also allowed for the attachment of multiple 9 track 1/2 inch reel to reel magnetic tape drives. Two more disk drives could be attached to the system. The century serie used instruction set with two instruction length 4 bytes (32 bits) and 8 bytes (64 bits).

Dancing rods

The memory of the Century Series computers used machine made, short (1/16 inch long and approximately the diameter of a human hair) iron-oxide coated, ceramic rods as their random access memories, instead of the hand-labor intensive core memories that were used by other computers of the time. These rods were inserted into a plastic alignment sheet which was wound with read, write, and sense wire coils arranged in columns and rows. To get the rods to stand up straight on the sheet (so that they would drop into the coils for assembly) a large electro-magnet was turned on and made the rods stand up and "dance" into the individual holes.

Flying heads

The Model 655 removable disc drives were the first to employ floating or flying heads. The marketing material made a big thing of this, but there were a number of problems that plagued all of the early Century Series systems. Head crashes were common, because the head flew less than a human hair's width above the disc surface. And, unless a drive unit was repaired and carefully cleaned after a crash, the next disc pack to load would also crash. If a crashed disc pack was loaded on an operational drive, it would destroy the head on that drive unit.

A feature of the 655 drives was 12 read / write heads per surface. This reduced track to track movement and thus access times. However, this meant that there were 12 times more heads per drive, further increasing the likelihood of head crashes. These flying heads were moved using a 16 position magnetic actuator. The actuator used four different magnets to create the 16 positions. Later NCR used disk units from other manufacturers. The magnetic actuators were later replaced with hydraulic actuators and later yet the hydraulic actuators were replaced with voice coil actuators.

Programming languages

The NCR Century 100 supported several programming languages. The first was Neat/3 which was a later version of the Neat/1 language that ran on the NCR 315 computer system. The second was COBOL. The third was FORTRAN, and the fourth was BASIC.