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Shown below
is a GE-415 medium scale computer designed in the early 1960s. The
GE-400 series were 24 bit binary word computers with each word consisting of 4 BCD characters, or 4 decimal digits.
Optionally, they included either a hardware or
software emulator that would run IBM 1400 series programs.
Four upward and downward
compatible processors were available; the GE-415, GE-425, and GE-435 and later the GE-405 was introduced as
a GE-400 series entry system. Each series had faster cycle times and a floating-point hardware option
was available for scientific users.
Initially, the operating system software was available for magnetic tape systems only, but later, a sophisticated Direct Access Programing System (DAPS) was introduced
to accomodate disk drives. DAPS could
multiprogram up to seven programs depending on the availability of core memory resources.
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| General Electric 415 Computer System - LINK |
Shown below, the GE-115 was marketed in the
US and by Bull-General Electric in Europe under the name of Gamma 115 and was manufactured by Italy, by Olivetti.
After the 1964 take-over by General Electric, Olivetti computers became OGE Olivetti-General Electric and were sold in the
worldwide market.
The GE-115 was a small scale computer generally
used as a replacement of card punch equipment and as a remote batch processing terminal connected to GE-400 series medium
scale and GE-600 series large scale computers.
Many GE-115 systems were equipped with tape drives
and eventually with magnetic discs. The system used typical second generation technology; discrete transistor logic and core
memory.
GE-115 production
was suspended in the mid-1970s, replaced by the Honeywell Level-62 and by the Level-64 which featured an emulator for the GE-115.
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| GE 115 Small Scale Computer |
The General Electric 225 shown below, connected to a GE Datanet 30 front
end processor, was the computer Dartmouth College chose to develop the Dartmouth Computer Timesharing System, or DTSS for
short. The Dartmouth project was the first large-scale time-sharing system to be implemented successfully.
The GE-265 was the first commercial
time-sharing system. It consisted of a GE-235 processor and a Datanet-30 communication processor. The two
processors were interconnected through a direct interface with both sharing a DS-20 disk unit.
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| General Electric 225 Computer System - LINK |
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