SYMBOL: a major departure from classic software dominated von Neumann computing systems

Abstract

The prime goal of the SYMBOL research project was to demonstrate, with a full-scale working system, that a very high-level, general-purpose, procedural, "state of the art" language and a large portion of a time-sharing operating system could be implemented directly in hardware and achieve a significant increase in overall computational rates. A further objective was to create hardware design and construction techniques which could be easily applied by a small number of people to implement such a system in a reasonable time and at a relatively low cost. Although this was a research project, there was a high dedication to developing automation, hardware, test equipment and documentation to support the project. The name SYMBOL was chosen to signify direct hardware symbolic addressing.