A slab or syllable is the primary unit of memory in the NCR 315 computer architecture from NCR Corporation. Having 12 data bits and a parity bit, its size falls between a byte and a typical word (hence the name, 'syllable'). A slab may contain three digits (with at sign, comma, space, ampersand, point, and minus treated as digits) or two alphabetic characters. A slab may contain a decimal value from -99 to +999. In psychology, memory is an organisms ability to store, retain, and subsequently recall information. ... The NCR 315 Data Processing System, released in January 1962 by NCR, was a second generation computer. ... A typical vision of a computer architecture as a series of abstraction layers: hardware, firmware, assembler, kernel, operating system and applications (see also Tanenbaum 79). ... NCR Corporation (NYSE: NCR) is a technology company specializing in solutions for the retail and financial industries. ... This article is about the unit of information. ... A parity bit is a binary digit that indicates whether the number of bits with value of one in a given set of bits is even or odd. ... In computer science a byte is a unit of measurement of information storage, most often consisting of eight bits. ... In computing, word is a term for the natural unit of data used by a particular computer design. ... At sign in Arial font “@” redirects here. ... A comma ( , ) is a punctuation mark. ... A space is a punctuation convention for providing interword separation in some scripts, including the Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and Arabic. ... The roman ampersand at left is stylized, but the italic one at right reveals its origin in the Latin word An ampersand (&), also commonly called an and sign, is a logogram representing the conjunction and. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... The plus and minus signs (+ and −) are used to represent the notions of positive and negative as well as the operations of addition and subtraction. ... The decimal (base ten or occasionally denary) numeral system has ten as its base. ...

A numeric value contains up to eight slabs. If the value is negative then the minus sign is the leftmost digit of this row. There are commands to transform digits into alphanumeric characters or inverse. All these commands use the accumulator which has a maximum length of eight slabs. To accelerate the processing the accumulator works with an effective length. In a computer CPU, an accumulator is a register in which intermediate arithmetic and logic results are stored. ...

The NCR 315 was the follow-on to the NCR 304. The NCR 304, introduced in 1957, was National Cash Register (NCR)s first transistor-based computer. ...

References

• Bardin, H (1963). "NCR 315 Seminar", Computer Usage Communique, Vol.2, No. 3., 1963. [1]