COMPASS, COMPrehensive ASSembler, [1] is any of a family of macro assembly languages for Control Data Corporation's 3000 series, and for the 60-bit CDC 6000 series, 7600 and Cyber 70 and 170 series mainframe computers. While the architectures are very different, the macro and conditional assembly facilities are similar.
There are two flavors of COMPASS on the 60-bit machines:
COMPASS is a classical two-pass assembler with macro and conditional assembly features, and generates a full listing showing both the source assembly code and the generated machine code (in octal). CDC's operating systems were written almost entirely in COMPASS assembly language.
Central processor (CP or CPU) hardware maintains 24 operational registers, named A0 to A7, X0 to X7 and B0 to B7. Registers X0 to X7 are 60 bits long and are used to hold data, while registers B0 to B7 are 18 bits long and their major purpose is to hold either addresses or be used as indexing registers, except that B0 is always zero. As a programming convention, B1 (or B7) often contains positive 1.
A or address registers are also 18 bits long. Each A register pairs with the corresponding X register. Whenever an address is set into any of A1 to A5 registers, the data at that memory location (address) is loaded into the corresponding X register. Likewise, setting an address into one of A6 or A7 registers stores the data held in the corresponding X6 or X7 register to that memory location. However, A0 can be used to hold any address without affecting the contents of register X0.
CP instructions are written in a particularly user-friendly form: "SA1 A0+B1" denotes set address register A1 to the sum of address register A0 and index register B1. The hardware then initiates a memory load from the computed address into register X1.
Peripheral processor (PP or PPU) instructions are completely different from CPU instructions. Peripheral processor hardware is simpler; it has an 18-bit A (accumulator register, a 12-bit Program Address register, a 12-bit Q register (not programmer-visible), and a 22-bit R register (used to accomplish address relocation during central memory read and write instructions on Cyber 180 systems). No special job validation was required to assemble peripheral processor programs, but to be executed, such programs were required to installed into the operating system via special system editing commands.
In computer programming, assembly language, often referred to simply as assembly and commonly abbreviated as ASM or asm, is any low-level programming language with a very strong correspondence between the instructions in the language and the architecture's machine code instructions. Assembly language usually has one statement per machine instruction (1:1), but constants, comments, assembler directives, symbolic labels of, e.g., memory locations, registers, and macros are generally also supported.
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Control Data Corporation (CDC) was a mainframe and supercomputer firm. CDC was one of the nine major United States computer companies through most of the 1960s; the others were IBM, Burroughs Corporation, DEC, NCR, General Electric, Honeywell, RCA, and UNIVAC. CDC was well-known and highly regarded throughout the industry at the time. For most of the 1960s, Seymour Cray worked at CDC and developed a series of machines that were the fastest computers in the world by far, until Cray left the company to found Cray Research (CRI) in the 1970s. After several years of losses in the early 1980s, in 1988 CDC started to leave the computer manufacturing business and sell the related parts of the company, a process that was completed in 1992 with the creation of Control Data Systems, Inc. The remaining businesses of CDC currently operate as Ceridian.
The Honeywell 6000 series computers were rebadged versions of General Electric's 600-series mainframes manufactured by Honeywell International, Inc. from 1970 to 1989. Honeywell acquired the line when it purchased GE's computer division in 1970 and continued to develop them under a variety of names for many years. In 1989, Honeywell sold its computer division to the French company Groupe Bull who continued to market compatible machines.
The CDC 6600 was the flagship of the 6000 series of mainframe computer systems manufactured by Control Data Corporation. Generally considered to be the first successful supercomputer, it outperformed the industry's prior recordholder, the IBM 7030 Stretch, by a factor of three. With performance of up to three megaFLOPS, the CDC 6600 was the world's fastest computer from 1964 to 1969, when it relinquished that status to its successor, the CDC 7600.
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The CDC 7600 was the Seymour Cray-designed successor to the CDC 6600, extending Control Data's dominance of the supercomputer field into the 1970s. The 7600 ran at 36.4 MHz and had a 65 Kword primary memory using magnetic core and variable-size secondary memory. It was generally about ten times as fast as the CDC 6600 and could deliver about 10 MFLOPS on hand-compiled code, with a peak of 36 MFLOPS. In addition, in benchmark tests in early 1970 it was shown to be slightly faster than its IBM rival, the IBM System/360, Model 195. When the system was released in 1967, it sold for around $5 million in base configurations, and considerably more as options and features were added.
The CDC Cyber range of mainframe-class supercomputers were the primary products of Control Data Corporation (CDC) during the 1970s and 1980s. In their day, they were the computer architecture of choice for scientific and mathematically intensive computing. They were used for modeling fluid flow, material science stress analysis, electrochemical machining analysis, probabilistic analysis, energy and academic computing, radiation shielding modeling, and other applications. The lineup also included the Cyber 18 and Cyber 1000 minicomputers. Like their predecessor, the CDC 6600, they were unusual in using the ones' complement binary representation.
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The CDC 3000 series are a family of mainframe computers from Control Data Corporation (CDC). The first member, the CDC 3600, was a 48-bit system introduced in 1963. The same basic design led to the cut-down CDC 3400 of 1964, and then the 24-bit CDC 3300, 3200 and 3100 introduced between 1964 and 1965. The 3000 series replaced the earlier CDC 1604 and CDC 924 systems.
The CDC 6000 series is a discontinued family of mainframe computers manufactured by Control Data Corporation in the 1960s. It consisted of the CDC 6200, CDC 6300, CDC 6400, CDC 6500, CDC 6600 and CDC 6700 computers, which were all extremely rapid and efficient for their time. Each is a large, solid-state, general-purpose, digital computer that performs scientific and business data processing as well as multiprogramming, multiprocessing, Remote Job Entry, time-sharing, and data management tasks under the control of the operating system called SCOPE. By 1970 there also was a time-sharing oriented operating system named KRONOS. They were part of the first generation of supercomputers. The 6600 was the flagship of Control Data's 6000 series.
SCOPE is a series of Control Data Corporation batch operating systems developed in the 1960s.
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