page_title: Philco computers
section_title: S-2000
hierarchical_section_title: Philco computers / Commercial / S-2000
caption_attribution_description: English: Philco 2000 computer, circa 1961
context_page_description: Philco was one of the pioneers of transistorized computers. After the company developed the surface barrier transistor, which was much faster than previous point-contact types, it was awarded contracts for military and government computers. Commercialized derivatives of some of these designs became successful business and scientific computers. The TRANSAC Model S-1000 was released as a scientific computer. The TRANSAC S-2000 mainframe computer system was first produced in 1958, and a family of compatible machines, with increasing performance, was released over the next several years.
  However, the mainframe computer market was dominated by IBM. Other companies could not deploy resources for development, customer support and marketing on the scale that IBM could afford, making competition in this segment difficult after the introduction of the IBM 360 family. Philco went bankrupt and was purchased in 1961 by Ford Motor Company, but the computer division carried on until the Philco division of Ford exited the computer business in 1963. The Ford company maintained one Philco mainframe in use until 1981.
context_section_description: The TRANSAC S-2000 was a large mainframe system intended for both business and scientific work. It  had a 48-bit word length and supported calculations in fixed point, floating point and binary-coded decimal formats. The original S-2000 "TRANSAC" (Transistor Automatic Computer) released in 1958 was later designated Model 210; it was used internally at Philco.  Similar to the Control Data Corporation Model 1604, it was a 48-bit fully transistorized computer. Three succeeding models were released in the series, all compatible with the software of the original model. The Model 211 was introduced in 1960, using micro-alloy diffused field-effect transistors, requiring significant redesign of circuits compared to the original. 
  The TRANSAC S-2000/Philco 210/211 weighed about 2,000 pounds (910 kg).
  By 1964, 18 Model 210, and 18 Model 211 and 7 Model 212 systems had been sold.
  After Philco was purchased by Ford Motor Company, the Model 212 was introduced in 1962 and released in 1963. It had 65,535 words of 48-bit memory. Initially made with 6-microsecond core memory, it had better performance than the IBM 7094 transistor computer. It was later upgraded in 1964 to 2-microsecond core memory, which gave the machine floating-point performance greater than the IBM 7030 Stretch computer. A Model 213 was announced in 1964 but never built. By that time competition from IBM had made the Philco computer operations no longer profitable for Ford, and the division was closed down.
  The Model 212 could carry out a floating-point multiplication in 22 microseconds. Each word contained two 24-bit instructions with 16 bits of address information and eight bits for the opcode.  There were 225 different valid opcodes in the Model 212; invalid opcodes were detected and halted the machine.  The CPU had an accumulator register of 48 bits, three general-purpose registers of 24 bits, and 32 index registers of 15 bits. Main memory size ranged from 4K words to 64K words. Only the first model had a magnetic drum memory; later editions used tape drives.
  The Model 212 weighed about 6,500 pounds (3.3 short tons; 2.9 t).
  Software for the S-2000 initially consisted of TAC (Translator-Assember-Compiler), and ALTAC, a FORTRAN II-like language with some differences from the IBM 704 FORTRAN implementation.  A COBOL compiler was also available, targeted at business applications.
  The Philco 2400 was the input/output system for the S-2000. Operations such as reading cards or printing were carried out through magnetic tapes, thereby offloading the S-2000 from relatively slow input/output processing. The 2400 had a 24-bit word length and could be supplied with 4K to 32K characters (1K to 8K words) of core memory, rated at 3-microsecond cycle time. The instruction set was aimed at character I/O use.
  The last Philco TRANSAC S-2000 Model 212 was taken out of service in December 1981, after 19 years service at Ford.
caption: Philco 2000
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