[6] A publishing company that purchased a CDC 160-A described it as "a single user machine with no batch processing capability.

Programmers and/or users would go to the computer room, sit at the console, load the paper tape bootstrap and start up a program.

"[7] The CDC 160-A was a simple piece of hardware, and yet provided a variety of features which were scaled-down capabilities found only on larger systems.

It was therefore an ideal platform for introducing neophyte programmers to the sophisticated concepts of low-level input/output (I/O) and interrupt systems.

All 160 systems had a paper-tape reader, and a punch, and most had an IBM Electric typewriter modified to act as a computer terminal.

Interrupts were introduced to neophytes as being the alert mechanism by which a program could be informed that a previously initiated DMA I/O operation was completed.

The 160 architecture was modified to become the basis of the peripheral processors (PPs) in the CDC 6000 series mainframe computers and its successors.