Ferranti Argus 350

The design of the Argus 300 was started in 1963 as a much faster machine featuring a fully parallel-architecture arithmetic logic unit, as opposed to the earlier and much slower serial units. Its instruction set was nevertheless fully compatible with the Argus 100. The 300 was very successful and used throughout the 1960s in various industrial roles. There was a variant of the 300, the Argus 350, which allowed external access to its core to allow direct memory access. This improved performance of input/output, avoiding having to move data via code running on the processor. The 350 was used in various military simulators, including the Royal Navy for frigate, submarine and helicopter based anti-submarine training, and the Royal Air Force for a Bloodhound Mk.II simulator and the Vickers VC10 Flight Simulator built at Redifon and delivered to RAF Brize Norton in 1967. The actual computer used on the VC10 Simulator was a 3520B, this meant that it had (20)kWords of memory and a (B)acking Store. The 350's were delivered in the 1967 to 1969 timeframe.