Fifty Years Ago .... from the pages of Computer Weekly

4th October 1973 computing, compiled by TNMOC volunteer archivist, Brian Aldous.

A selection of stories from Computer Weekly from 4th October 1973. The full archive of Computer Weekly can be seen at TNMOC, where there are special rolling displays of front pages from 25 and 40 years ago.

Character Reading Wand
A hand-held wand for reading printed eye-readable characters may be available soon from Recognition Equipment of Dallas, Texas. Industry sources indicate that a prototype wand has already been shown in Europe to certain long-term potential customers. The most promising application could be in the booming PoS market. RE in the UK are unable to comment as yet about the wand and there is no indication yet of when it will be officially announced or how much it will cost. It appears, however, that development is quite well advanced since it is believed that the prototype model can read the numeric and special characters of the OCRA and Farrington 7B stylised founts. Characters are read by a photo diode array chip at the tip of the wand and some of the character recognition and coding circuitry is located in the wand body itself. Interfacing would simply involve incorporating a single additional PC board in the main body of the terminal using the wand. (CW 4/10/1973 p1)

More versatile PC system from GEC
Manufacturers looking for a more versatile process control system than hard-wired relays or solid state networks will be interested in a programmable logic controller system developed by GEC-Elliott Process Automation Ltd. The system offers a number of general purpose computer features without accompanying cost and employs a programmable read-only memory, PROM, which can be programmed on-site if required by any process engineer with an appreciation of logic and Boolean arithmetic. The PLC system incorporates inputs and outputs in up to 47 groups of 16 per card and can operate at over 100,000 instructions a second. Each instruction is made up of 16 bits, five for the function and 11 representing the address. There are 11 “bit” instructions, each of which operate on a particular input/output bit, nine "word” instructions and seven “jump” instructions. Up to 2,048 of these instructions can be held in the PROM in modules of 32, on cards holding up to 512. Each module comprises a group of integrated circuits each of which consists of a matrix of fusible links. Programming involves the fusing of certain of these links to create a string of binary bits, 0s and 1s, representing instructions and locations. (CW 4/10/1973 p25)