The word slab has several meanings.
Computer science
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.
