The Elliott 503 computer was a big brother to the Elliott 803 computer. I have no personal experience of the 503, as they were more powerful and hence more expensive and therefore not so many were produced.
The instruction set was almost identical to that of the 803, but the arithmetic unit operated in parallel, rather than serial mode, and this gave the much enhanced speed. Programs written for the 803 could, in general, be run on the 503, but this was provided that they conformed to a list of minor restrictions. In particular, Algol or Autocode programs could run directly, or be converted to the 503 dialect using utility programmes.
The documents provided here were scanned by Eric van der Meer who had managed to retain the manuals when the 503 that he had been using was scrapped. He has kindly made these available to me for inclusion in my collection. The files are rather large, 5-20 MBytes, and are in PDF format. One day I may get around to converting them to HTML, which will reduce the size considerably, but time is precious so don't hold your breath! Many thanks to Eric for the hours he spent scanning hundreds of pages!
* These appear to be earlier editions of material from the Computer Manual
Since Elliotts no longer exist, copyright in these documents was transferred in various takeovers over the years. I understand that the copyright is currently held by Fujitsu, and they have kindly given the Computer Conservation Society permission to publish these, and other documents on the World-Wide Web. If this is not the case, then I apologise in advance for any infringement and will remove these documents.
Footnote: My broadband connection is less than state of the art so don't expect to achieve high download speeds!
Page created by Bill Purvis, last update 7th February, 2010.