Computer Technology Limited or CTL, was a British computer company founded slightly later than Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the United States.
Founder Iann Barron had worked for Elliott Computing but left to form CTL when he couldn't persuade Elliott to incorporate his ideas in their next generation of computers. He left in 1978, going on to form Inmos and develop the transputer.
The first CTL computer (the Modular One) appeared for sale in 1969.
Contents
[hide] * 1 The Modular One * 2 Operating system * 3 Later history * 4 References
-------------------------------------------------
The Modular One[edit]
This was a 16-bit computer built with Emitter Coupled Logic (ECL) and was competitive with other first generation minicomputers. A key feature, from which it derived its name, was that it was composed of separate processor, memory and peripheral modules sharing a common interface and physical form factor, so allowing them to be put together in any combination, housed one or two high in modular racking. Standard modules were roughly 50cm wide and deep, 70cm tall, and complete with power supply, typically weighed in excess of 25kg. Modules were interconnected using a single type of interface, comprising two identical cards to be plugged into two modules to be connected, these cards themselves linked by a flat ribbon cable either one or two metres long. Thus, memory was just another peripheral (such as a printer) but was both input and output. Every interaction over these interfaces comprised a 3-way handshake, which in the case of a processor accessing a memory module, consisted of send address, receive data, and send new data, a scheme well suited to the destructive read followed by rewrite required by magnetic-core memory of the time. These three phases were mediated by voltage edges rather than pulses, as this was thought to be