Fairly Extensive Singer/Friden "System Ten" Computer System for Rescue

Through my Old Calculator Museum website, I have been contacted by a gentleman that has a fairly substantial Singer/Friden System 10 that is located in a building that the business wants to clear out. The computer system is slated to end up in a dumpster if it isn't rescued. The place the machine was stored is indoors, in an office-like space in a larger warehouse style building. The space was not temperature controlled, but there are no signs of water damage or serious corrosion. Some critters (probably mice) have been inside the cabinets of the system, but the contact said that there were no obvious signs that they chewed anything up. The system is very dusty (it was not covered), and it appears that some panels on the cabinets may have been removed, but are probably with the system. Some stuff appears to be partly disassembled. There also might be some spare parts, e.g., circuit boards. The system consists of a CPU, probably a Model 20, two Model 80 Display Terminals, a line printer of some sort, and two Mode 40 disk-pack (aka dishwasher-sized) disk drives. There are quite a few Model 41 disk packs there.. There also appears to be some documentation. There may also be some kind of magtape drive with the system, as there is a rack full of 7 or 9-track tapes hanging in it. Not sure if these are included with the system, though. Here is a link to some photos of the system: http://pail.bensene.com/Singer10 Beware that the web host does not have much upstream bandwidth, and the photos are pretty high resolution, so downloading them may take some time. Most of the photos are between 1.8 and 2.5 megabytes in size. there is some documentation on the Singer System Ten up on Bitsavers at http://bitsavers.org/pdf/singer/systemTen . Some of the documentation there is for the equipment that is available. These systems aren't very common, and there likely aren't all that many of them left in existence. Singer sold a lot of these systems into retail outlets as part of one of the first online Point-of-Sale systems. One notable account was Sears and Roebuck, who installed a huge networked (via Modem) environment using System Ten machines in stores to run Point-of-Sale systems, with modem links to larger systems that collected the information, and usually fed it to even larger systems (e.g., IBM mainframe) for inventory management, bookkeeping, and other large corporate-level reporting/management systems. However, the system aged quickly, as other competitors came onto the Point-of-Sale scene very quickly, with systems that were less expensive, more reliable, and more easily maintained. Many of the Singer systems in large retailers were replaced within a few years of being put into service. There was little market for "used" systems, so most all of them taken out of service went for scrap. The System 10 CPU was pretty unique in that it had "hardware"-based timesharing. The system managed time-slicing between "partitions" in main memory (magnetic core) with hardware that provided a fixed timeslice to each partition, switching to the next either when the time-slice ran out, or certain instructions (e.g., I/O) were executed that would trigger an immediate context switch. The system had hardware protection for the partitions to isolate the partitions from each other, allowing them to run independently. There was a shared and a read-only system partition which could facilitate inter-partition communications and management functions. Pretty cool for a design done in the late '60's. It'd be a real shame for this system to end up in the trash, which is exactly where it will go if a home can't be found for it relatively soon (e.g., next couple of weeks). The system is located in West Chicago, IL. It's all pretty sizable, so, you'd probably need a small commercial-style moving van with a lift-gate (the stuff is likely quite heavy, especially the disk drives) to haul it. You would also probably need a heavy-duty hand-truck or two, and some strong straps. You'd need some muscle, too. I suspect it'd be more than a 1-man job. My contact wants it out of there. You just have to come get it and haul it away. If you have any serious interest in rescuing this system, drop me an Email, and I'll put you in touch with my contact. Hopefully someone out there can give this machine a new home. Email: rickb .at. bensene .dot. com Rick Bensene The Old Calculator Museum http://oldcalculatormuseum.com