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Datapoint 2200

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Datapoint 2200
Datapoint 2200 computer
ManufacturerComputer Terminal Corporation
TypeIntelligent terminal, personal computer
Release dateMay 1970; 54 years ago (1970-05)
Discontinued1979; 45 years ago (1979)[1]
Operating systemDatapoint O/S
CPUserial, discrete logic implementation of the Intel 8008 instruction set
Memory2 KB standard; expandable to 16 KB
DisplayText only, 80×12 characters

The Datapoint 2200 was a mass-produced programmable terminal usable as a computer, designed by Computer Terminal Corporation (CTC) founders Phil Ray and Gus Roche[2] and announced by CTC in June 1970 (with units shipping in 1971). It was initially presented by CTC as a versatile and cost-efficient terminal for connecting to a wide variety of mainframes by loading various terminal emulations from tape rather than being hardwired as most contemporary terminals, including their earlier Datapoint 3300.[3] However, Dave Gust, a CTC salesman, realized that the 2200 could meet Pillsbury Foods's need for a small computer in the field, after which the 2200 was marketed as a stand-alone computer.[3] Its industrial designer John "Jack" Frassanito has later claimed that Ray and Roche always intended the Datapoint 2200 to be a full-blown personal computer, but that they chose to keep quiet about this so as not to concern investors and others.[2][4] Also significant is the fact that the terminal's multi-chip CPU (processor)'s instruction set became the basis of the Intel 8008 instruction set, which inspired the Intel 8080 instruction set and the x86 instruction set used in the processors for the original IBM PC and its descendants.

Technical description

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Datapoint 2200 version I registers
12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 (bit position)
Main registers
A Accumulator
B B register
C C register
D D register
E E register
H H register (indirect)
L L register (indirect)
Program counter
P Program Counter
Push-down address call stack
AS Call level 1
AS Call level 2
AS Call level 3
AS Call level 4
AS Call level 5
AS Call level 6
AS Call level 7
Flags
C P Z S Flags

The Datapoint 2200 had a built-in full-travel keyboard, a built-in 12-line, 80-column green screen monitor, and two 47 character-per-inch cassette tape drives each with 130 KB capacity. Its size, 9+5⁄8 in × 18+1⁄2 in × 19+5⁄8 in (24 cm × 47 cm × 50 cm), and shape—a box with protruding keyboard—approximated that of an IBM Selectric typewriter.[5] Initially, a Diablo 2.5 MB 2315-type removable cartridge hard disk drive was available, along with modems, several types of serial interface, parallel interface, printers and a punched card reader. Later, an 8-inch floppy disk drive was also made available, along with other, larger hard disk drives. An industry-compatible 7/9-track (user selectable) magnetic tape drive was available by 1975. In late 1977, Datapoint introduced ARCNET local area networking. The original Type 1 2200 shipped with 2 kilobytes (KiB) of serial shift register main memory, expandable to 8 KiB. The Type 2 2200 used denser 1 kbit RAM chips, giving it a default 4 KiB of memory, expandable to 16 KiB. Its starting price was around US$5,000 (equivalent to $38,000 in 2023), and a full 16 KiB Type 2 2200 had a list price of just over $14,000.

The 8-bit processor architecture that CTC designed for the Datapoint 2200 was implemented in four distinct ways, all with nearly identical instruction sets, but very different internal microarchitectures: CTC's original design that communicated data serially, CTC's parallel design, the Texas Instruments TMC 1795, and the Intel 8008.[6]

Datapoint 2200 Version II (CTC's parallel design) was much faster than the TMC 1795, which was slightly faster than the original serial design of the Datapoint 2200, which in turn was considerably faster than the 8008.[7][dubious – discuss]

The 2200 models were succeeded by the 5500, 1100, 6600, 3800/1800, 8800, etc.

The fact that most laptops and cloud computers today store numbers in little-endian format is carried forward from the original Datapoint 2200. Because the original Datapoint 2200 had a serial processor, it needed to start with the lowest bit of the lowest byte in order to handle carries. Microprocessors descended from the Datapoint 2200 (the 8008, Z80, and the x86 chips used in most laptops and cloud computers today) kept the little-endian format used by that original Datapoint 2200.[7][8]

The seed of the x86 architecture

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The original design called for a single-chip 8-bit microprocessor for the CPU, rather than a processor built from discrete TTL modules as was conventional at the time. In 1969, CTC contracted two companies, Intel and Texas Instruments (TI), to make the chip. TI was unable to make a reliable part and dropped out. Intel was unable to make CTC's deadline. Intel and CTC renegotiated their contract, ending up with CTC keeping its money and Intel keeping the eventually completed processor.[2]

CTC released the Datapoint 2200 using about 100 TTL components (SSI/MSI chips) instead of a microprocessor, while Intel's single-chip design, eventually designated the Intel 8008, was finally released in April 1972.[9]

Even though the Datapoint 2200 processor design employed a bit-serial microarchitecture, operating one bit at a time, it performed faster than the Intel 8008 microprocessor which employed an 8-bit parallel microarchitecture.[7][dubious – discuss]

Possibly because of their speed advantages compared to MOS circuits, Datapoint continued to build processors out of TTL chips until the early 1980s.[7]

Nonetheless, the 8008 was to have a seminal importance. It was the basis of Intel's line of 8-bit CPUs, which was followed by their assembly language compatible 16-bit CPUs — the first members of the x86 family, as the instruction set was later to be known. Already successful and widely used, the x86 architecture's further rise after the success in 1981 of the original IBM Personal Computer with an Intel 8088 CPU means that most desktop, laptop, and server computers in use today have a CPU instruction set directly based on the work of CTC's engineers. The instruction set of the highly successful Zilog Z80 microprocessor can also be traced back to the Datapoint 2200 as the Z80 was backwards-compatible with the Intel 8080. More immediately, the Intel 8008 was adopted by very early microcomputers including the SCELBI, Mark-8, MCM/70 and Micral N.

Instruction set

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Instructions are one to three bytes long, consisting of an initial opcode byte, followed by up to two bytes of operands which can be an immediate operand or a program address. Instructions operate on 8-bits only; there are no 16-bit operations. There is only one mechanism to address data memory: indirect addressing pointed to by a concatenation of the H and L registers, referenced as M. The 2200 does, however, support 13-bit program addresses. It has automatic CALL and RETURN instructions for multi-level subroutine calls and returns which can be conditionally executed, like jumps. Direct copying may be made between any two registers or a register and memory. Eight math/logic functions are supported between the accumulator (A) and any register, memory, or an immediate value. Results are always deposited in A. Most instructions are executed in 16μs, 24μs, or a leisurely 520μs when accessing M. The 520μs represents the delay of the 2200's shift register memory to fully recirculate back to the next instruction. Branch type instructions take a variable amount of time (24μs to 520μs) depending on the distance of the branch.

Datapoint 2200 version I instruction set
Opcode Operands Mnemonic Time μs Description
7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 b2 b3
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 X — — HALT — Halt
0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 — — SLC 16 A1-7 ← A0-6; A0 ← Cy ← A7
0 0 CC 0 1 1 — — Rcc (RETURN conditional) 16/† If cc true, P ← (stack)
0 0 ALU 1 0 0 data — AD AC SU SB ND XR OR CP data 16 A ← A [ALU operation] data
0 0 DDD 1 1 0 data — Lr data (Load r with immediate data) 16 DDD ← data (except M)
0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 — — RETURN † P ← (stack)
0 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 — — SRC 16 A0-6 ← A1-7; A7 ← Cy ← A0
0 1 CC 0 0 0 addlo addhi Jcc add (JMP conditional) 24/† If cc true, P ← add
0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 — — INPUT 16 A ← input
0 1 command 1 — — EX command (external command) 16 command ← A (coded 8-31 only)
0 1 CC 0 1 0 addlo addhi Ccc add (CALL conditional) 24/† If cc true, (stack) ← P, P ← add
0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 addlo addhi JMP add † P ← add
0 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 addlo addhi CALL add † (stack) ← P, P ← add
1 0 ALU SSS — — ADr ACr SUr SBr NDr XRr ORr CPr 16/520 A ← A [ALU operation] SSS
1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 — — NOP 16 No operation (Actually LAA)
1 1 DDD SSS — — Lds (Load d with s) 16/520 DDD ← SSS
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 — — HALT — Halt
7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 b2 b3 Mnemonic Time μs Description
SSS DDD 2 1 0 CC ALU
A 0 0 0 FC, C false ADr AD (A ← A + arg) † Variable. Can be from 24μs to 520μs.
B 0 0 1 FZ, Z false ACr AC (A ← A + arg + Cy)
C 0 1 0 FS, S false SUr SU (A ← A - arg)
D 0 1 1 FP, P odd SBr SB (A ← A - arg - Cy)
E 1 0 0 TC, C true NDr ND (A ← A ∧ arg)
H 1 0 1 TZ, Z true XRr XR (A ← A ⊻ arg)
L 1 1 0 TS, S true ORr OR (A ← A ∨ arg)
M 1 1 1 TP, P even CPr CP (A - arg)
SSS DDD 2 1 0 CC ALU

Code example

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The following Datapoint 2200 assembly source code is for a subroutine named MEMCPY that copies a block of data bytes from one location to another. Because the byte counter is only 8 bits, there is enough room to load all the subroutine parameters into the 2200's register file. If a 16 bit count is needed, a more complicated copy routine with parameters held in memory would be required. 

                   
                   
                   
                   
                   
                   
                   
                   
    
002000  317    
002001  206 020 004
002004  371        
002005  206 020 004
002010  302
002011  024 001
002013  320
002014  110 000 004
002017  007        
        
          
002020  306
002021  364        
002022  004 001
002024  340
002025  305        
002026  353
002027  014 000
002031  330
002032  007        
002032             

; MEMCPY --
; Copy a block of memory from one location to another
;
; Entry parameters in registers
;       HL: 13-bit address of source data block
;       DE: 13-bit address of target data block
;       C: 8-bit count of bytes to copy. (1 to 256 bytes)
 
            ORG     2000Q       ;Code at 002000 octal
MEMCPY      LBM                 ;Read source byte into B
            CALL    XCHGI       ;Exchange HL<->DE and increment DE
            LMB                 ;Save B to target byte
            CALL    XCHGI       ;Exchange HL<->DE and increment DE
            LAC                 ;Decrement byte counter in C
            SU      1
            LCA
            JFZ     MEMCPY     ;Continue for all bytes
            RETURN
            
;Exchange DE and HL register pairs then increment DE as 16 bits
XCHGI       LAL                 ;Exchange L and E
            LLE
            AD      1           ;and inc E, low byte of DE
            LEA
            LAH                 ;Exchange H and D
            LHD
            AC      0           ;proagate Cy into D
            LDA
            RETURN
            END

Credits

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The original instruction set architecture was developed by Victor Poor and Harry Pyle.[10] The TTL design they ended up using was made by Gary Asbell. Industrial design (how the box's exterior looked, including the company's logo) was done by Jack Frassanito.[2]

Specifications

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Main unit

Peripherals

Users of the 2200 and succeeding terminals eventually had several optional units to choose from. Among these were:

See also

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References

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  1. ^ "Datapoint Corporation Datapoint 2200". OLD-COMPUTERS.COM : The Museum.
  2. ^ a b c d Wood, Lamont (August 8, 2008). "Forgotten PC history: The true origins of the personal computer". Computerworld.
  3. ^ a b Wood, Lamont (2013). Datapoint: The Lost Story of the Texans Who Invented the Personal Computer. Hugo House Publishers, Ltd. pp. 102–103. ISBN 9781936449361.
  4. ^ Weinkrantz, Allen (June 2, 2009). "San Antonio Has Claim As The Birthplace of the Personal Computer. Read All About It". Archived from the original on March 4, 2016.
  5. ^ Datapoint 2200 Reference Manual Version I and Version II (PDF). Datapoint Corporation. 1972.
  6. ^ Shirriff, Ken (August 30, 2016). "The Surprising Story of the First Microprocessors". IEEE Spectrum. 53 (9): 48–54. doi:10.1109/MSPEC.2016.7551353. S2CID 32003640.
  7. ^ a b c d Shirriff, Ken. "The Texas Instruments TMX 1795: the first, forgotten microprocessor".
  8. ^ "Oral History Panel on the Development and Promotion of the Intel 8008 Microprocessor" (PDF). September 21, 2006. p. 5.
  9. ^ Thompson Kaye, Glynnis (1984). A Revolution in Progress - A History to Date of Intel (PDF). Intel Corporation. p. 13. "The 8-bit 8008 microprocessor had been developed in tandem with the 4004 and was introduced in April 1972. It was originally intended to be a custom chip for Computer Terminals Corp. of Texas, later to be known as Datapoint." "As it developed, CTC rejected the 8008 because it was too slow for the company's purpose and required too many supporting chips."
  10. ^ Dalakov, Georgi (April 23, 2014). "History of Computers and Computing, Birth of the modern computer, Personal computer, Datapoint 2200".
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