Description
This computer was 38 ft (12 m) long, 20 ft (6.1 m) wide, and used 2700 vacuum tubes for its logic circuits. Its drum memory was 8.5 in (22 cm) in diameter, rotated at 3500 rpm, had 200 read-write heads, and held 16,384 24-bit words (a memory size equivalent to 48 kB) with access time between 32 microseconds and 17 milliseconds.
Instructions were 24 bits long, with 6 bits for the opcode, 4 bits for the "skip" value (telling how many memory locations to skip to get to the next instruction in program sequence), and 14 bits for the memory address. Numbers were binary with negative values in ones' complement. The addition time was 96 microseconds and the multiplication time was 352 microseconds.
The single 48-bit accumulator was fundamentally subtractive, addition being carried out by subtracting the ones' complement of the number to be added. This may appear rather strange, but the subtractive adder reduces the chance of getting negative zero in normal operations.
The machine had 38 instructions.
Read more about this topic: UNIVAC 1101
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