11 Facts About Atlas Computer

Atlas Computer was one of the world's first supercomputers, in use from 1962 to 1972.

Atlas Computer was created in a joint development effort among the University of Manchester, Ferranti International plc and the Plessey Co.

Two further Atlas Computer 2s were delivered: one to the CAD Centre in Cambridge, and the other to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, Aldermaston.

Parts of the Chilton Atlas Computer are preserved by National Museums Scotland in Edinburgh; the main console itself was rediscovered in July 2014 and is at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Chilton, near Oxford.

Atlas Computer had been designed as a response to the US LARC and STRETCH programs.

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Atlas Computer was much faster than LARC, about four times, and ran slightly slower than STRETCH - Atlas Computer added two floating-point numbers in about 1.

Atlas Computer was multiprogrammed with a well defined interface between the user and operating system, had a very large address space, and introduced the notion of extra codes to extend the functionality of its instruction set.

Atlas Computer did not use a synchronous clocking mechanism — it was an asynchronous processor — so performance measurements were not easy, but as an example:.

One feature of the Atlas Computer was "Extracode", a technique that allowed complex instructions to be implemented in software.

Atlas Computer pioneered many software concepts still in common use today, including the Atlas Computer Supervisor, "considered by many to be the first recognisable modern operating system".

The Atlas Computer did however support Algol 60, as well as Fortran and COBOL, and ABL .