PDP's, InterData, Burroughs B1700

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2 total messages Started by Lindsay.... Lindsay F. Marshall Wed, 17 Jan 1990 16:15

#988

Author: Lindsay.... Lindsay F. Marshall
Date: Wed, 17 Jan 1990 16:15

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Seeing we're talking about PDP's. Anyone remember the PDP-16? This
was'nt an actual machine but was a collection of asynchronous cards
that could be hooked together to build your own systems. We used to
use them for hardware experiments when I was a student and they were
very susceptible to static 'cos I remember being able to start up one
system that I built simply by olling my chair across the floor.

Also how about any Interdata 70 fans out there? I seem to recollect
that the teletype port used the *same* buffer/register for both input
and output making I/O a little hard to get right.

I also noticed a mention of the Burroughs B1700 in the flashing lights
discussion. What a really great machine that was. Way ahead of its
time. Ours had very slow, unreliable discs and a *very* fast card
reader and printer on it. The trouble was that we could never drive
the card reader at faster than about 5 or 6 cards a minute as parts of
the microcode that drove system were always being swapped in and out.
It turned out, that there huge chunks of the I/O system devoted to
driving all kinds of weird things like cheque sorters and when this
was all choppped out things went a lot better. You wrote the microcode
in an assembler that was modelled on COBOL..... but all the same one
of my all time favourite machines right up there with the PDP-8,
PDP-15 and PDP-11/45.

Lindsay


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Re: PDP's, InterData, Burroughs B1700

#989

Author: dell... Dave Elliott
Date: Sat, 27 Jan 1990 03:12

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Got my introduction to personal computing on a DEC PDP-12, which was a
two-headed laboratory computer. One head was a normal PDP-8, the other was
a LINC computer, which had a vector CRT output, analog/digital I/O, and
lots of other nice interfaces as well as its own CPU. We did our listings 
and graphical output (image of the curves on the CRT) on a Versatec printer
 with fantastic resolution.     Nice thing about
the DEC machines was that all one needed, in 1975, was a system tape and
a rather small manual (TECO, Fortran, Assembly,...) -- less than  400 
pages. The only real trouble was that the teletype I/O was deafening in
a tiny room....

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