About these pages

When someone commented to me that Singer was "not exactly a cutting edge technology company" by the 1970s, I was taken aback. Not just because of their nifty re-packaging of the FlexoWriter in an attractive 1960s shell, or Singer-Link graphics tech, but because of an apparently little known microprocessor designed by Singer in the early 1970s. Since I have a (paper) copy of the ABO manual, I thought that making it available was the best rebuttal. You can get each of the scanned page images from this page or access them from the HTML version of the Table of Contents

About the ABO

Best I can do is quote from the preface to the manual (scanned image here)

The ABO (Advanced Byte Oriented) Microcomputer has been developed by the Business Machines Division and the Corporate R&D Laboratory of The Singer Company. The concept, architecture and instruction set were developed in early 1973 by Bryan Girard (BMD), C. William Hicks (BMD), Jack Landau (Corporate R&D Laboratory), and Larry Wagner (BMD). Larry Wagner was responsible for the microprogramming. Miles Meinc and Murry Rubinstein (Corporate R&D Laboratory) were responsible for the MOS LSI circuitry design.

The processor itself falls into its time-period rather well. Coming chronologically between the Intel 8008 and 8080, it is also midway between those two in concept and implementation. I'm resisting the urge to editorialize too much, but suffice to say that it looks like many people were thinking along similar lines at that time.