The Titan was the third computer designed and built in the Computer Laboratory, entering service in 1966.
Titan used the CPU from the Ferranti/Manchester Atlas 1, without the VM hardware, using a locally-designed memory system instead. Most (all?) of the operating systems was locally written, including the timesharing supervisor and the filesystem.
Titan was commercialised as the Atlas 2 – the first commercial time sharing system(?). The Cambridge CAD Centre (situated close to the current Gates Building --- our third building) purchased an ATLAS 2. That machine provided the main computer service for the University during the period when the first Computer Lab, on Corn Exchange Street, was knocked down and rebuilt as our second accommodation (now the David Attenborough building).
This multiplexor connected 64 serial lines from teletypes around the University for remote login. When a character was received an interrupt was given to Titan which could then read the character and the source number and send back output characters to print: just like the command line on a linux machine today. Some lines were further shared with uni-selector circuit switching.
Of special interest is buffer memory (behind the plastic sheet): this consists of a grid of 64x16 ferrite cores that stores one bit per core.
Unique id/year of acquisition: CL-77/99
Name: Titan multiplexor
Class: peripheral
Machine name: Titan
END. (C) 2026 University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory (DJG).