• 1969

Hardware Description

The first UNIVAC 418-III was delivered in 1969. It was available with 32,768 to 131,072 words of memory. Memory cycle time was reduced to 750 nanoseconds. New instructions were added for floating-point arithmetic, binary-to-decimal and decimal-to-binary conversions, and block transfers up to 64 words. The SR register was expanded to 6 bits. The 418-III had two unique hardware features which enabled it to handle continuously high speed serial character streams. One was called the buffer overflow interrupt and the other hardware buffer chaining. By the 1990s, all the 418 hardware was gone, but the California Department of Water Resources was still running 418 emulation on a UNIVAC 1100/60.