Non-renewal processes are relevant in queueing analysis to include various types of traffic arising in integrated services communication networks. We consider a workload based approach to the single server queue in discrete time domain with semi-Markov arrivals (SMP/G/1). Starting from a subdivision of the busy periods, we generalize a computationally attractive algorithm for the discrete time GI/G/1 queue. The stationary distributions of the waiting and idle time as well as the moments of the busy period are computed. Performance results are given for deterministic servers with autoregressive input and the output process of a server is modelled by adapting a SMP of small size.