"JAXAshby" wrote in message
...
comments interlaced
Your claim was that all computers had FPUs
nope. not what I said. you said none were available until the 1980's. I said
1950's
btw, large computers didn't -- and don't -- have Floating Point Units (see
jeffies? today you learned what FPU means). Floating point is designed in
from the start. Takes more time to calc than interger, but it is there from
the get go
So? That wasn't the case with small machines.
BTW, CDC was founded late in the 50s; I'm not sure they actually shipped a
machine with floating point until the mid '60s.
you are wrong.
Not according to this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_Data_Corporation
It says the first machine was delivered in 1960. (I think it was shown in 1959)
btw, you "home" computer was 11/23 in the early 80's?
Sure, why not? It only cost a few thousand dollars, used.
bull. a PDP-6, maybe, but not even a PDP-11. check your numbers dude. 11/23
was state of the art at that time. I sold interger machines at the time
rather
than scientific machines. I DO know that "home computers" (i.e. 8086 based)
would go for upwards of six grand and those things didn't hardly compete with
an 11/23.
You know not of what you say. The smallest version of the 11/23 was 3 or 4
boards," one with the CPU, one with memory, another had 4 serial lines and a
Floppy controller (I think this was 3rd party).
http://hampage.hu/pdp-11/1123.html
This pic shows our box, though we used a cheap VT52 when we first got it.
http://hampage.hu/pdp-11/kepek/pdp-1123.jpg
This came out in 1979, so by 1981 it was not "state of the art" and we were able
to get a very minimal used system for maybe $3000. We would "code for parts" so
would could build it up very cheaply.
The DEC is long gone, but I still have the front panel from the DG, and my
partner has the core memory board.
try again.
I had the DEC at mine.
no you didn't
These were floppy based
machines
no they weren't. In 1972 Shugart still worked for IBM and the floppy was
still
IBM technology and was used to boot a System 32.
DEC had the RX01/RX02 in 1978, maybe earlier. 8 inch floppies I think ours was
a dual RX01.
our first in '82 from Apple computer,
which was 68000 based, recently updated from a 6800 (btw yo-yo, Motorola
called
the microprocessor chip a "68000" because supposedly it had 68,000
transistors,
which it didn't)
I'm quite familiar with the 68K; the job from Apple required porting about
15,000 lines of assembly code from DG and DEC to 68K. I did most of the porting
work, while my partner wrote the assembler. (Our product was a
compiler/assembler/development environment.) We didn't actually have a 68K, we
cross-compiled on the DG machine, transfered to the DEC, wrote a RX01 floppy
(which was a bit of a standard in those days), and drove across town to debug on
68K Unix box. Within 2 weeks of starting, my partner was flying to CA with the
11/23 stuffed in a suitcase. It took him several days to get it running on the
Lisa (whose O/S was much like the first Macs). Using our software, he then
solved the problem that had roadblocked the Lisa group - interference from the
floppy that jittered the screen.
Actually, around 1972 I had at home an IBM 2741 Selectric terminal
a 2741 was part of an RJE station (which used punch cards) and was about the
size of two chest-style home freezers.
Wrong again, jaxie.
http://www.multicians.org/terminals.html
"got my first home terminal in 1967, when I was working on Multics at Project
MAC. It was an IBM 2741, the standard machine for the programming staff. Like
the 1050, the 2741 had a Selectric mechanism built into a desk, but one smaller
than the 1050's, and with a slimmer electronics box and fewer switches."
Actually, I didn't work at Multics, my room mate did. But it was handy to have.
with a
134.5
baud modem that I could dial into Multics developement system at MIT, but
that's
another story.
another bogus story.
Aren't you tired of always being wrong?
btw, how many wires on a "discrete" transitor used on a CDC machine?
careful
how you speak, for my brother worked the technical end of CDC for over 30
years.
I don't remember ... would be a good
guess for a transistor. I dealt with it at the "gate" level,
"gate" level, eh?
not the
individual
transistors.
that is what a "gate" is, yo-yo, in this context
Wrong again. Gates are logical. They can be implemented with a transitor, plus
a few other things, but to a logic designer a gate and a transitor are two very
different things.
IIRC, the logic was on small boards
you are talking about TTL logic, dude. which is a whole different story than
the one you are telling
Wrong again. I said this was discrete, not integrated circuits. TTL was
certainly availible by the time I was playing with this, maybe 1970, but the CDC
3000 was built in the early '60s before ICs. Each little circuit board had
roughly what one IC chip had a few years later.
that each had 2 flip-flops, which probably had 2 transistors each.
no it didn't
Wrong yet again. A simple flip-flop is made with 2 gates, which as you said,
can be one transistor each.
http://www.facstaff.bucknell.edu/mas...eStageFlipFlop
Of course, I don't remember the exact nature of these boards, the EE side of it
didn't interest me much.
The back
of
it was a *lot* of wire wrap.
yo-yo, you were looking at the semi-conductor replacements for core memory of
older, already installed machines. the "lot of wire" was there to slow the
semiconductor memory response speed down to core memory speed so the machine
didn't get ahead of itself. you know, don't you, that electricity travels one
foot per nano-second?
Wrong one more time. Since each circuit board was the equivalent of one "chip,"
the backplane of the rack was the euivalent of the wiring embedded in today's
boards. There were thousands of these small boards, all connected through
wirewrap.
I'd guess around 30,000 "gates" in the machine,
but I could be way off.
not even frickin close.
OK, you tell me - how many gates were in the CDC 3000?
The logic book was several inches thick, with timing
charts and logic diagrams. ("On the leading edge of this signal, the data
from
register x would be latched into buffer y ...")
dude, you were looking at a repair manual.
I don't beleive there was a "repair manual" for the CPU, just the logic diagram.
But as I said, I was only around one for a few weeks.
So jaxie, send this off to
your
brother and ask him if its a fair description, given that I spent a few weeks
with the machine 35 years ago.
If I sent it too him without telling him the source he would say, "Some
Internet yo-yo, I see"
Your brother knows you well.