The Ferranti Packard Canada FP6000

• Links etc here

Following the receipt of a number of FP6000 manuals, we were able to update our 1904/5/9 emulator to a more correct and complete form. The main enhancements and fixes included: -

• Realisation that FP6000 and therefore the 1905 and 1909 had a FP unit that implement all of the generalised FP as per the 1900 FP specification in TP4999.
• The already known difference between the FP6000 and the 1904 range was that ICT added the ICT 'Standard Interface' in addition to the FPC Interface Standard. ICT interface transferred 6-bits at a time and was controlled by a set of 6-bit codes, the FPC Interface, which was actually 'standard' within FPC, had a 24-bit control, status and data path.
• That the 'Monitor Modes' were a hardware facility which passed down into all 1900s bar the 1901/2/3 and 1901A. (1906A/S - does anyone know?)

It was also realised that the executive written by FPC was quite similar to the E4BM exec that we have for the 1905, but with important differences :-

• The 1900 'range standard' used the 157 PERI instruction to initiate transfer to peripherals. The type of the peripheral being held in part of the PERI control area which was addressed by the PERI instruction.
• On the FP6000, the code numbers for the basic peripherals was established (LP = 2, CR = 3, MT = 5 etc), but FP6000 exec did not use the 157 order as PERI. (157 is an extracode, so it is up to exec to do what it is coded to do with it). On FP6000 exec to start a line printer (LP, type 2) transfer, you used a 172 X N(M) instruction, where the 2 in the 172 order itself told exec that this was a line-printer order, the X was the unit number and the address pointed at the text to be printed. - Similarly to punch on the program's second card punch you would have coded a 174 2 /BUFF. This restricted the number of peripherals of any type to 8 for any program.
• The FP6000 provided some FP functions such as SQRT etc via other extracodes.