The Singer System 10 was a proper business computer. None of this binary stuff, just good straightforward decimal numbers. Even the store and disk drives were addressed in decimal. If God had wanted us to use binary He'd have given us only two fingers, well maybe eight or sixteen.
The instructions were 10 characters long where each character took up 6 bits. Each digit took up one character. The machines were known for their robustness and supported task switching in the hardware.
ICL later took over the Singer machines and put in techie features like using 8 bit characters and calling them bytes. They also added logical operations like OR, AND and NEQ. And they even used a variant of the Micos microprogrammed engine used in the ICL ME29 series instead of honest to goodness hardware!
The architecture is described in more detail in Singer System-10. This and other homebrew and vintage machines can be found in Welcome to Dave Brooks' homepage!.
Pages from the Programmers Reference Booklet, click for an enlarged version of any picture:
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| Instruction bit layout |
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| Instruction set |
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| Branch statements |
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| Details |
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| P,B and A registers |