The worlds first commercially available 16-bit microcomputer, the DDP-116 was introduced in 1965 by CCC: Computer Control Company Inc. They were taken over by Honeywell in 1966. Only 200 DDP-116 computers were ever made. They are 2nd generation machines, using only discrete electronic components. No IC Chips. Slot in cards were used to perform logic functions.
Only 5 DDP-116 computers are known remain. In addition to ours, there is one at the Computer History Museum, and 3x at the 3C Legacy Projecy.
Also see Adrian Wises’ page on the Series-16 computers.
2 Comments
Pierre · July 14, 2022 at 2:02 pm
Hi there,
a very nice webpage with beautiful pictures of your DDP-116! Thanks for sharing this with the public! I came across your page while looking for some information on it because there was such a computer stored at our nuclear physics department of the university in Germany until 2004 before it was given to a private museum within Germany (not me). I love this machine and it meant a lot to me that it was not scrapped but given into good hands. In other words, there is at least another DDP-116 in existence in Europe in addition to your list of systems that are known to have survived.
Is your system in operating condition?
pflegende angehoerige · December 14, 2022 at 4:51 am
Great!
the DDP-line is a important component in my IT-biography.
Never seen a origin piece of it, but love it and read every pice in the net. First own desktop day (and many nights) environment was the DDP 516 fork behind the iron curtain in the GDR: KRS 4200 also 16kB; drum and best of all: a typewriter-tty. Mostly identical on assembly it has an own OS with some parts for different Aplication devOp and also an in eastern germany self developed Dialog Interpreter DIWA ( -> https://www.robotrontechnik.de/html/forum/thwb/showtopic.php?threadid=1929 ) later we got also on a 30 cm diameter paper-punch ribbon a Basic Interpreter forked from some DDP516 stuff. This was a stress-test begin for our lovely “KRS” (Kleinrechnersystem”): Early in the morning every Operator girl, it were only girls in our stuff, run her bio-rythm Basic job. The best of all: this only runs through the typewriter as ouput-printing device. Regulary it ended up with a hunt for “flying” typos. Especially the dot, because of “plotting” the bio-rythm diagram with only miving the dot around the line …
LoL
was big fun!
3 or 5 devices exist (Erfurt, Halle, Dresden, ???)