Established in 1968 by former Control Data Employees, Minneapolis based Data 100 was a commercial maker of IBM compatible computer peripheral equipment during the late 1960s and 1970s. It specialized in remote access workstations with card readers and line printers, compatible with the IBM 2780 and IBM 3780 series. The European factory was located in Hemel Hempstead, England, where assembly, integration and distribution was carried out. Later this operation was relocated to Cork, Ireland. The company was purchased by Northern Telecom (which later became Nortel Networks) in 1978 and merged with Ann Arbor, Michigan based, Sycor Inc. The company name remained in Europe till the early 80's
Model 70 (1968) was a Hardwired device emulating the IBM 2780 Remote Job Entry (RJE) terminal.
Model 78 (1971) was a programmable RJE terminal supporting a variety of peripherals.
Model 71 (1972) programmable device emulating the IBM 3780 RJE.
Model 74 (1974) Keybatch was a RJE terminal with key-to-disk capabilities. These direct data entry (DDE) devices consisted of a keyboard and a 256 characters display. Dial-up remote data entry terminal were available in 1975. In 1977 the Canadian branch developed support for Optical Mark Reader device OMR.
Model 76 (1975) was a cost reduced IBM 3780 emulator.
Model 85 (1977) was an attempt into the data processing arena. The only programming language was IBM RPG.
Peripheral equipment sold and maintained under the Data 100 name: Dataproducts Card Reader (Models 300, 600, and 1200); Groupe Bull high speed Card Punch; Paper tape readers; Dataproducts High speed drum printers; Control Data Corporation (CDC) chain train printers; Magnetic Tape drives. Fixed and removable hard disk drives.
One Operating System used in the key-to-disk system, was called FML-11 - which meant Field Modified Level 11. This OS was an interrupt driven, multitasking OS with individual device drivers for the peripheral hardware. The computer hardware did not support stacks, so subroutines were called by executing a "return Jump" RTJ assembler instruction. This instruction modified the code at the beginning of the call function and inserted the return address. Reentrancy was achieved by the use of a double linked list of buffers, which was maintained by the scheduler.
The memory was 64K bytes and in the event of a crash was dumped and analysed in its entirety.
Patching was available with areas of RAM set aside for this purpose.
Communication protocols supported were ASYNC, Bisync and SDLC.