IBM 4702

At 12:31 PM 8/15/2008, David Betz wrote: http://www.plippard.com/pgl/CodingChronology.aspx Sounds sufficiently weird to me. :-) "The IBM 4700 Finance Communication System (FCS) consisted of a programmatic controller and related peripherals, used primarily in finance industry retail branches. The graphic above was the best I could do at finding a photo of an IBM 4702. I think the IBM Corporation would like to forget about the 4700. In fact, the IBM 4700 product line may have been the most forgettable product the IBM Corporation ever made. For me, and due to its proprietary architecture, the IBM 4700 product line spelled profitability. Introduced in the same year as the IBM PC (1981), the 4700 FCS was the follow-on product to replace the IBM 3600 FCS. Unlike the IBM PC, the 4700 FCS was very much a proprietary hardware and software product. All programming for the IBM 4702 processor was conducted with an IBM mainframe based language called 4700 Finance Communication Language (FCL). 4700 FCL essentially used the IBM mainframe Assembler Language macro capability to generate 4700 FCL op codes, which in turn were downloaded to the IBM 4702 and interpreted by the 4700 microcode. If one has a creative imagination and compares 4700 FCL to today's modern world of programming, 4700 microcode interpretation of 4700 FCL op codes is similar in concept to the Microsoft .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR) and its interpretation of Microsoft Intermediate Language (IL) instruction codes." - John