The GEC 2050 was an 8-bit minicomputer produced during the 1970s, initially by Marconi Elliott Computer Systems of the UK, before the company renamed itself GEC Computers Limited. The first models were labeled MECS 2050, before being renamed GEC 2050.

The GEC 2050 was commonly used as a Remote Job Entry station, supporting a punched card reader, line printer, system console, and a data link to a remote mainframe computer system, and GEC Computers sold a complete RJE package including the system, peripherals, and RJE software. Another turnkey application was a ticketing system, whose customers included Arsenal Football Club. The system was also commonly used for road traffic control and industrial process automation.

The GEC 2050 supported up to 64KiB of magnetic-core memory (minimum 4KiB, expandable by 8KiB and 16KiB modules). Weighed 41 kg (90 lbs). The system had a single Channel Controller for performing autonomous I/O, and used the same peripheral I/O controllers as the GEC 4000 series minicomputer.

Although CISC, the instruction set is sufficiently simple to be tabulated in its entirety:

Using the opcode 29 as an illustration, the assembler code (AD X2,X1,offset) causes the contents of the memory location 'offset(X1)' to be added to register X2. Thus, register X1 is being used as the index register, and the offset, v, is specified in the second byte of the instruction. G is a dummy index register whose value is always zero, and hence causes the offsets to be treated as absolute addresses in the zeroth (global) segment. (Incidentally, since X3 is the standard index register, the assembler program allows ',X3,address' to be abbreviated to ',address'.)

The conditional jump instructions are listed in pairs, the former opcode is for a forward jump, and the latter one for a backward jump. Again, the offset of the jump is obtained from the second byte of the instruction. Thus, all instructions in rows 0 to 7 and row 9 consist of two bytes (the opcode and a data byte) while all the other instructions consist of just a single opcode byte.

The main accumulator register, A, can be set to be 1, 2, 3 or 4 bytes in length, using the SETL instructions. This controls how many bytes are loaded (or stored) in a memory-access instruction. The JIL instruction performs a Jump Indirect, like the JI instruction, but saves the value of the program counter, S, into index register X2. This allows very simple non-recursive subroutine calls to be achieved. More complex subroutine calls involve the use of the PREP instruction, which saves the return information in the first bytes of the current memory segment. Such calls, too, cannot be recursive.

This section describes a work session on this computer, at one typical installation in 1975. The programmer might arrive, to work on a Fortran-II program that he had already started writing in the previous session, carrying a teleprinter paper listing of that program that has been annotated with the new changes that are to be made, and the punch tape that contains the machine-readable source code of the program. He would first need to turn on the computer at the switch on the conventional mains socket on the wall, and then at the front-panel on/off switch. Since the magnetic core memory, which is non-volatile memory, would generally still contain the previous user's program, the programmer might need to load the punched tape called Minisystem (containing the object code of a small, memory monitor program). This tape, which was stored in a small cardboard box on a shelf near the computer, would be entered from the left of the tape-reader. The tape-reader was an integral part of the front panel of the computer, and would spill out the tape that it had read, on to the floor, on the right-hand side. Once read, the Minisystem could be started by flicking the Run switch on the front panel.