Singer System Ten

By 1962, its chain of retail stores were selling their machines, fabrics, haberdashery and patterns – everything for the housewife who made clothes and furnishings.

It then designed a computer, originally called the Business Data Processor (BDP) and soon renamed the System Ten.

Newly appointed Managers and Directors were trained in the technology and the marketing strategy, and the Singer System Ten was launched throughout Europe on 2 April 1970.

The machine had no operating system that scheduled the use of the processor: instead, it would have up to 20 'partitions' each of which had dedicated memory of up to 10 kilobytes, and a common area that all partitions could access, limited initially to 10K in the earlier models but expanded up to 100K in later ones.

For devices such as terminals, printers, card readers and punches, a Multi-Terminal IOC (input-output channel) was installed, which ran at about 20 kbit/s.

No machine language translator since has come anywhere close to this level of complexity, probably as few understood it, and the processing time for even the smallest programs could be prohibitively long.

When this strategy failed, they turned to a division of Singer which made intelligent terminals, to re-engineer the system and bring it up to the then modern-day standards and considerably reduce its size and power consumption.

Some European Singer Business Machines companies ignored this strategy, and set up small internal software houses to write customers' applications.

Singer also created software packages for retail applications, which grew out of its installed customer base, the largest of which was at the Wanamaker's department store in Philadelphia.

Despite its major thrust as a retail backroom machine,[5] it was still sold as a general purpose business computer, as it did support the common peripherals of the day such as video terminals, punched cards, printers and, later, disk and magnetic tape storage for sales, stock and accounting applications.