IBM 610 Auto-point: weird 1950's computer

IBM 610 Auto-Point computer (annotated)

Have you ever gone into your pantry, closed your eyes, randomly picked out the first dozen ingredients, and challenged yourself to make a dinner from whatever you grabbed? Well, it sure seems like that's how IBM designed the 610 computer.

The always-awesome bitsavers site has a couple of manuals for the IBM 610 auto-point (an old name for floating-point) computer, including a snazzy brochure and an operations guide. The breathless prose ("arithmetic and logical problems can be solved on the spot") hints of a world of promise, but a peek under the covers shows that this is, in fact, a bit of a monstrosity.

The keyboards

There are two keyboards, which seems like a lot. The one further on the left is called the "typewriter" and is a repurposed electric typewriter (which IBM also made, so they had them in stock). The typewriter is used to print out the results. As a special feature, you could type on the typewriter, and it would type onto the paper. There's no way to type on the typewriter and get it into the computer.

The specialized keyboard on the right is the "console". IBM loved their consoles. It's where you enter in your data, and it's also where you create your programs. The console is not to be confused with the control panel, which is another thing entirely.

The console has 43 keys. There are 11 number keys (0 to 9 and decimal point), plus 7 common math operations (+ - * / square-root convert [change sign] and a combined divide/multiply).  There are 2 blank keys, because why not. The rest of the keys are for controlling the machine, and entering in commands.

Programming the machine

You might be thinking, "what languages does this machine handle". The answer is: take a look at the keyboard. Whatever you can type there, the machine can do. Each possible machine opcode is a single keystroke. That might be nice if this was, say, a Sinclair ZX80 running BASIC. Instead, these are rather bizarre opcodes. Let's divide them up into groups.

I should point out that you can also program the computer via a program punch tape, which just duplicates the keyboard but weirdly, and you can program the computer via the control panel. And they can be mixed together, and the person at the keyboard can always override whatever commands you set up.

Input (control) selection keys (4): KB DTR PTR CP. Says which input device the computer should use for control: keyboard, data tape reader, program tape reader, and control panel. 

Output keys: TYP CR TAB DTP RO. The first three turn on the typewriter, either at the current position, after a carriage-return, or after a tab. DTP turns on the data tape punch. RO will  write the current register out to the selected output -- so to write a number to the typewriter at the current position, you have to do a TYP RO. But this won't work, because RO doesn't really do the auto-point conversion; first you have to do a SL15. The RO will undo the previous SL15, giving a truly weird side-effect.

Register edit keys: CLR CLR-RH COPY SL15 SR15 SL SR. The normal kinds of things like CLR to clear a register, CLR-RH to just clear the right-hand half of the register. SL15 and SR15 are just bizarre, but you have to use them to get output.

Control keys: REL INT  RSM ENT

REL  will drop out of the current operation, and reset the selected register. Interrupt will interrupt the current operation, but if you press it and a particular light goes on, you have to press RSM (resume) until the light goes off. ENT will "prepare the machine to enter data into a register"

Other keys: SEQ A DEL

The A key is used to select the A register. Otherwise, you'd have to select it by number, which is is register 2. DEL will help fix any data entry mistakes. SEQ is special, and deserves a section all to itself.

Lights, more light, other more lights.

The keyboard includes a set of lights that help you figure out what the computer is doing, and a set of "check" lights. 

But wait, there's more. The keyboard also includes a tiny, 2-inch (5 cm) cathode-ray tube (like an LCD screen, but uses more electricity). That screen lets you view the contents of the current register as tiny dots. 

Here's the pattern for "I'm entering the number 22.37".

The actual little numbers 0..9 aren't displayed; you just have to kind of squint and carefully measure where the little dots are. It's not (seemingly) calibrated, and each column can only display one dot. No, you can't display DOOM on this.

The main body of the computer also has lights, this time to tell you what the current program step and current registers are, plus whether the machine is off, on, or really on.

SEQ (Sequence)

Never have I ever read that description and understood it. But I'll try. A "hub" can't be described until "control panel" is described. A control panel is a set of bulk-removable wiring that can customize many kinds of very old IBM machines. Control panels predate computers, which is why they are a so very deeply different. 

If you have, say, a device that reads in punch cards and then prints the results, you might have a control panels with 80 wires, once from each card column that gets read going to one print position. Often they will be "straight", so that column 10 on a card will print into column 10 on the printer. But you can get fancy: you can print only some of the data, or duplicate some columns. And you can "suppress leading zeros" for some set of data, so that if the card is punched as "00020" you can print just the "20", which is often much easier to read. And it gets so, so, so much more complex.

A "hub" can now be described: it emits a pulse, so that you can have sequences of events. Yeah, sorry, not super clear. What can I say: IBM has hundreds of pages about hubs. 

The "machine functions" that the control panel opens up include things like "loops". That's right, writing a program with loops is impossible with just the keyboard; you have to wire it yourself.

 You might also want to program with fancy "if" statements. Those are available when you use the paper tape. The paper tape uses an 8-channel (8-bit) code. The top two bits say what "class" any particular instruction is in -- classes 0, 1, 2 and 3. You can specify which classes of instructions you want to run at any time. Yes, this means you a main body, a "if-else" statement, and a remaining "if" statement, and that's it. But good news: you can interleave the different statements together. 

But wait -- which class gets used? Answer, of course, as with everything about this machine, is that it depends, There's four switches on the manual keyboard, one for each class, and they can be set to "always", "never" and "depends on the programming panel". 

That auto-point isn't really floating point

IBM was really happy with their "auto-point" concept. If you've never used the previous technology -- which would be a "slide rule" -- those devices don't include the magnitude of the number at all. That is, you multiply "1.23" x "6.78" in the exact same way that you multiply "123" x "678" -- you just have to remember where the decimal point is.

With the "auto-point" concept, you get a bunch of registers, each of which can hold some numbers like "1.23" or "6,780". As you enter each number in, when you get to the decimal place, the number will automatically adjust in the machine so that the integer "left side" of the decimal point uses half of your register, and the fractional remainder goes into the right side of the register. 

On the one hand, this is convenient: you don't have to remember where the decimal point goes in your result of 83394. On the other hand, very large and very small numbers are absolutely impossible, and your precision will vary all over the place.

In summary: 

Every single part of the IBM 610 is harder to understand, and weirder, and pointless duplicated, with extra complications thrown in just to try to keep everything kind of working.