Slab - Definition and Overview

The slab is the smallest accessible unit of the second generation computer NCR 315. A slab has 12 data bits and the parity bit. A slab may contain three digits (0-9, @, comma, space, ampersand, point, minus) or two alphanumeric characters. A slab may contain a decimal value from -99 to +999. 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. Grace to the accumulator there are a lot of one address commands which also speeds up the processing.