Titanism

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Titan computer, 1965

Titan was the name given to the prototype Atlas 2 computer developed by Ferranti and the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory in Cambridge, England. It was in operation from 1964 to 1973. Titan differed from the Manchester Atlas by having a real, but cached, main memory, rather than the paged (or virtual) memory used in the Manchester machine. The Titan's main memory had 128K of 48-bit words and was implemented using ferrite core store rather than the part core, part rotating drum-store used on the Manchester Atlas. It also had two large hard-disk drives and several magnetic tape decks. As with the Manchester Atlas, it used discrete components, in particular germanium transistors.

As a prototype it had a reputation for technical excellence and ran an early and very successful multi-user time-sharing system; but it was also often highly unreliable, and indeed some wiring anomalies were still being discovered several years after it was first commissioned. One of its most intensive uses was to compute the inverse Fourier Transforms of data from the One-Mile Radio Telescope.

A second Atlas 2 was built, also in Cambridge, and was installed at the Computer-Aided Design Centre (CADCentre) on Madingley Road. This machine, the last Atlas, was finally switched off on 21 December 1976.

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