Titan (computer)

The Titan computer was the name given to the Atlas 2 developed by Ferranti and the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory. It differed from the Manchester Atlas by having a real, but cached, main memory, rather than the paged (or virtual) memory used in the Manchester machine. The Titan's main memory had 128K of 48-bit words and was implemented using ferrite core store rather than the part core, part rotating drum-store used on the Manchester Atlas. It also had two large hard-disk drives and several magnetic tape decks. As with the Manchester Atlas, it used discrete components, in particular germanium transistors.

Related Topics:
Ferranti - University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory - Atlas - Core store - Drum-store

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As a prototype it had a reputation for technical excellence and ran an early and very successful multi-user time-share system; but it was also often highly unreliable, and indeed some wiring anomalies were still being discovered several years after it was first commissioned. One of its most intensive uses was to compute the inverse Fourier Transforms of data from the One-Mile Radio Telescope.

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There was one other Atlas 2 built, which was also in Cambridge, at the Ministry site on Madingley Road.

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