🚀 go-pugleaf

The Honeywell 200 was originally designed as an input/output machine for 
the H800 (a truly wierd computer, with process multiplexing in hardware, 
among other things). When the machine was being designed there was a 
major dispute about what the instruction set should be. Somebody tossed a 
1401 manual on the table and said "why not this?" Thus, by accident, was
born the first clone (ca 1963).

When I joined Honeywell in 1966, the company was booming in the 1401 
replacement market. This was due to three factors: the cycle-stealing I/O 
invented by my old boss, Lou Oliari (a character if there ever was one), 
a program called "Liberator" done by Dick Little, which converted 1401
assembly programs to 200 Easycoder, and, most importantly, the read 
backward cascade polyphase sort, whose author's name escapes me. Sorting 
was critical to performance in the batch tape days, and we would beat 
IBM's brains out in benchmarks (I was in the benchmarking/demo group part 
time).  The 360 came out, running 1401 programs under emulation, and we'd 
cream them even worse. It was so bad that people ran service bureaus that 
did nothing but sort tapes; you brought your daily work in at 5:00 PM and 
picked up the sorted tape in the morning. Even big dedicated IBM shops 
had 200's sitting in the background chugging away sorting tape.  The 
funnies story in that regard came from GM; when the IBM salesman would 
show prospects the acre of dark grey boxes, there would be this bright 
blue thing with Honeywell written on it back in the corner. If the 
prospect asked what it was, the IBM salesman replied that it ran the air 
conditioning (Honeywell being best known for building controls).

Earl