NCR Century 100

The console of the system had only 18 lights and switches and allowed entry of a boot routine, or changes to loaded programs or data in memory.

The 615-100 Series integrated a complete data processing system that had 16KB or 32KB of short rod memory, an 80-column punched card reader or paper tape reader, two 5MB removable disk drives, and a 600-line-per-minute line printer.

The NCR Century 100 supported several programming languages: NEAT/3 (National's Easy Auto-coding Technique, a later version of the NEAT/1 language that ran on the NCR 315 computer system), COBOL, FORTRAN, RPG-II, NEAT/AM, and BASIC.

Without a sign, a (positive) number could be stored in just two bytes, with each of the 8 bits of the character holding 2 digits, such as 0001 0010 0011 0100 for 1234.

A typical hardware configuration consisted of a panel with toggle switches and lights to enter the boot loader, a Teletype writer to input operating system commands, a punched card reader that gravity feed the cards (they dropped into the read station, and were ejected and turned 180 degrees and then placed in the exit hopper), two 655 disk drives, and a printer that printed about 600 lines per minute.

[citation needed] A unique feature of the Century's hardware/software design allowed the normal 4K executive to be reduced to a mere 512 bytes, freeing up precious storage.