To print: Click here or Select File and then Print from your browser's menu

This story was printed from silicon.com, located at http://www.silicon.com/

Story URL: http://hardware.silicon.com/desktops/0,39024645,39280958,00.htm

Photos: Britain's first business computer
The Elliott 803 - and its whopping 4KB of memory...

By Andy McCue

Published: Friday 05 September 2008

The Elliott 803 was developed in the early 1960s and until 1965 it was the single most popular British computer for big businesses and universities.

This is the console for the Elliott 803 on display at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park.

It has no screen or keyboard and programming the machine was done initially through the front panel. The user would manually set up an address in memory, the instruction would be programmed into that memory and then stored there. The process was repeated step-by-step, loading instructions into memory. Once the programme was complete, the user would then switch over to 'obey' and start the machine running.

To see the Elliott 803 in action, check out our video here.

Photo Credit: Andy McCue/silicon.com