Description
Ferranti's Sirius was a small business computer released in 1961. Designed to be used in smaller offices without a dedicated programming staff, the Sirius used decimal arithmetic instead of binary, supported Autocode to ease programming, was designed to fit behind a standard office desk, and ran on U.K. standard mains electricity (then 240 V) with no need for cooling. It was also fairly slow, with instruction speeds around 4,000 operations per second, and a main memory based on delay lines, but as Ferranti pointed out, its price/performance ratio was difficult to beat.
