The 801 minicomputer

This paper provides an overview of an experimental system developed at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. It consists of a running hardware prototype, a control program and an optimizing compiler. The basic concepts underlying the system are discussed as are the performance characteristics of the prototype. In particular, three principles are examined: system orientation towards the pervasive use of high level language programming and a sophisticated compiler, a primitive instruction set which can be completely hard-wired, storage hierarchy and I/O organization to enable the CPU to execute an instruction at almost every cycle.