Singer System 10

The Singer System Ten was a small-business computer manufactured by the Singer Corporation. The System Ten, introduced in 1970, featured an early form of logical partitioning. The System Ten was a character-oriented computer, using 6-bit BCD characters and decimal arithmetic.

In the early 60s The Singer Sewing Machine Company had a dominant share of the world market in domestic and small industrial sewing machines. By 1962 its chain of retail stores were selling their machines, fabrics, haberdashery and patterns – everything for the housewife who made clothes and furnishings. There were 175 retail stores in the US, and many in Europe as well. Like many chains of small retail stores with a wide product range, stock control and stock swapping were critical to cash flow and profits. Under the leadership of its CEO, Donald P Kircher, Singer therefore approached several computer manufacturers, inviting them to bid for the design and manufacture of computers which could connect to the several tills in each store, and act as the central point for collecting real-time information on stocks and sales. IBM and NCR, then the world’s largest computer companies, rejected the offer to bid, and so did some others. The only company to take up the challenge was Friden, an American company based in Oakland, CA which made accounting machines based on punched paper tape. Singer accepted Friden’s bid.

In 1965 Singer bought out Friden, setting it up as Singer Business Machines. It then designed a computer, originally called the Business Data Processor (BDP) and soon renamed the System Ten. In 1969, Singer Business Machines created a subsidiary, the Advanced Systems Division, in each Western European country to launch and market the Singer System Ten. Newly appointed Managers and Directors were trained in the technology and the marketing strategy, and the Singer System Ten was launched throughout Europe on April 2, 1970.

The design of the System 10 was revolutionary, because of the special requirements of what are now called “point of sale” systems. The machine had no operating system that scheduled the use of the processor: instead, it would have up to 20 'partitions' each of which had dedicated memory of up to 10 kilobytes, and a common area that all partitions could access, limited initially to 10K in the earlier models but expanded up to 100K in later ones. The system was called “The System Ten” because it performed all of its computations in decimal, as opposed to its counterparts which operated in binary. (It was never called “System 10”, with or without a hyphen, although many countries tried to rename it. In Spain, the complaint was that “System Ten” means “Hold the system!”).

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