ICT 1900 is the name given to a series of mainframe computers released by International Computers and Tabulators (ICT) in the 1960s.
The first machine was in fact the 1904 which was a Canadian design from the Ferranti-Packard company, originally called the FP6000, although commonly referred to within West Gorton as the FP1. It is said that this machine with 'core store memory' fired up with its program still in store after its sea freight journey from Canada.
The first commercial sale was made in 1964 to the Morgan Crucible Company and consisted of a 16k word 1902 with an 80-column 980 card/minute reader, a card punch, a 600 line/min printer and 4 x 20Kbs tape drives. It was soon upgraded to a 32K word memory and a floating point unit to allow for some scientific work. Incidentally this company was also the first business to order ICT's previous computer, the HEC4 (later ICT 1201) in 1955.
One feature of these mainframes was the common instruction set throughout the range meaning that programs written and compiled on one machine would run unchanged on any other. In fact the hardware was different between machines. To achieve this a program termed "the executive" or exec encapsulated the hardware and supplied software routines to supplement the hardware supplied instructions.
By 1968 ICT had merged with English Electric computers and became ICL.