Talk:Ferranti Sirius

A fact from Ferranti Sirius appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 5 November 2009 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that Ferranti's Sirius small business computer was based on a logic system known as "Neurons" that used transistors to simulate the operation of magnetic amplifiers?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2009/November.

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Price?

Nifty article. Could we have a price check please on how much this cost when it came out? --71.110.67.204 (talk) 03:01, 5 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, good point. And easily found as it turns out. Maury Markowitz (talk) 14:08, 5 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"During the 1950s there was widespread interest in the use of magnetic amplifiers as a solid state switching device.[1] The amplifiers used the saturation points and hysteresis curves of a magnetic core to sum a number of inputs and settle to a single output state." I worked on magnetic amplifiers, and also was in the design team of the Ferranti Sirius from 1959 to 1962. The logic in the Sirius had nothing to do with magnetic amplifiers. All the transformer did was create an output voltage proportional to the sum of the input currents, positive and negative. It was merely a summing transformer, summiong the input primaries. Ivor Catt — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.156.252.218 (talk) 17:26, 2 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I think the article pretty clearly states that Sirius did not use magnetic amplifiers, but a transistor system that emulated them. Maury Markowitz (talk) 18:11, 10 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

"Emerging as the Ferranti Orion in 1961,[10] the system proved to be a disaster. As the machine was much larger than the Sirius physically, it had longer wire runs and thus required larger currents to operate the Neurons." I am sure this is wrong. Orion was in the next lab to me with Sirius, and they used the same logic boards. The problem with Orion would have been interference between signals. I am sure they went down one wire, with what we called "earth" return. We already had the problem with the added box (half the size of a piano) of extra memory. Crosstalk was thought to be capacitance between the wires. Scarrott suggested mutual inductance. His suggestion set me on the way to my work on the subject for decades to come. http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x147.pdf - Ivor Catt, 24.5.2022 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.24.141.57 (talk) 11:05, 24 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]