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Starting in 1924, and over about 30 years, T. J. Watson had positioned IBM as the dominate force in "unit record" accounting, punched cards, ... .
Around 1950, the new UNIVAC had made inroads to major IBM customers, and also T. J. Jr. was stressing T. J. Sr. about getting into the
new field of electronic data processing, using vacuum tube based computers.
By 1955, IBM had largely replaced Remington Rand UNIVAC as the principle producer of computers,
and magnetic core memory was successfully introduced,
and transistors were beginning to be inexpensive and reliable enough to be used by the
thousands replacing vacuum tubes.
A Survey of Domestic Electronic Digital Computing Systems
BALLISTIC RESEARCH LABORATORIES - REPORT NO. 971 - DECEMBER 1955
About then, IBM issued a directive that all further computer designs would use transistors exclusively.
And about then
the design effort for the IBM 1401 started. And in 1958 the IBM 1401 was anounced and deliveries of this early all transistor machine
(with one vacuum tube used in a test timing alignment amplifier) began.
"A Third Survey of Domestic Electronic Digital Computing Systems"
Report No. 1115, March 1961 - by Martin H. Weik,
The IBM 1401 sold very well by any standard in the business computer market place.
(The machine could not compete with anyone in the scientific computer business.)
Over about 8 years of availability (until replaced by the low end of the IBM 360 family) a total of about 13 thousand
were sold - making it an early or maybe the first "mass produced" computer.
Many other companies were also eager to get into the computer business
including middle management of General Electric - in the face of a directive by GE CEO Ralph Cordiner, who did not want
to compete with, nor antagonize, IBM. That is another story altogether. :-|
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Many of the computer products competed with the IBM 1401 - intentionally or accidentally. Probably the most successful
was the Honeywell 200 (sales brochure) with a conversion product called Liberator. Not all programs could be successfully
converted - but enough to cause justified excitement in IBM. To counter the enhanced concurrent input - compute - output of the
Honeywell 200, (and many others), IBM introduced the OVERLAP capability - not very slick but helped keep sales up - until the
introduction of the IBM 360 series caused excitement at Honeywell ;-)) - Datamation Aug 1965 image from Dag Spicer
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1 page ad
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Sorry I don't have hard numbers of the relative sales over intervals of time. (Some ex-IBMer had heard that IBM lost about 180
1401 system sales to the Honeywell 200 & Liberator.)
- Wouldn't it be interesting to see the real numbers. :-))
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeywell_200
Milton.Nancy at verizon.net wrote
| " My IBM Captivator software that stymied Honeywell 200 Liberator conversions
of IBM programs. It was a card box full of subroutines that could be used
by Autocoder programmers for many functions. Honeywell's Liberator software
could not handle these subroutines. Thus, a number of IBM 1401s stayed on
rent in the face of H 200 competition."
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Van Snyder wrote
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I found my H-200 programming manual, Honeywell document DSI-214A (H-200 only, not 200-1200-2200).
Can be found here - 21 Megabyte .pdf file
In three-character (18-bit) addressing
mode,
the low-order 15 bits are the address, and the high-order three
bits are
index register designators. Zero means no indexing, seven means
indirect. There was also a two-character (12-bit) addressing mode,
without indexing, and a four-character (24-bit) addressing mode
with 15
or 30 index registers (models 201-1 and 201-2 only). The address
format
was entirely different from the 1401 address format, so it was
impossible to run 1401 "binaries."
In addition to Easytran (Honeywell's Autocoder-to-Easycoder converter)
there was a "bridge" library to simulate infrequently-used 1401
instructions that didn't have direct H-200 counterparts. These were
entered by putting the processor in "trap" addressing mode. In this
mode, if an instruction begins with a character having both a word
mark
and an item mark, it is executed as a "change sequence mode"
instruction, which exchanges the program counter and the sequence
register. The trap handler than interprets the instruction. I don't
know which 1401 instructions were handled in this way.
I suspect the processor on the H-200 where I worked was a model
201, not
201-1 or 201-2, with less than 32k memory, because I never heard of
four-character addressing mode, or 15 index registers.
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Epilog
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Ten years after the 1401, IBM had clearly won the battle for business data processing. Twenty years later,
niche markets of note were
low and high end scientific (DEC and CDC), and timesharing. IBM could afford to be a little arrogant ;-))
- this was their decade - Then the current cheap microprocessor, semi-conductor memory and
reliable hard drives allowed "rest of us" to own computers.)
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| from August 1978 Datamation page 44, courtesy Dag Spicer
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