The Elliot 803

The Elliot 803 was the first computer that I did any serious programming with in the 1960s. It came with a massive 4k (yes 4096) words of ferrite core memory Each word was 39bits long, comprising two 19-bit instructions with a single modifier bit in the middle position that enabled instruction modification at run time.


The 803 had only a single address register to point at data and a single accumulator/register for all the processing to take place in.


There is a working example of an 803 at Bletchley Park