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

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

with a
134.5
baud modem that I could dial into Multics developement system at MIT, but
that's
another story.

another bogus story.

sure, and you traveled to junior high school on a hydrazine rocket.

That's silly. I teleported.

while you read "Amazing Stories"

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

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

that each had 2 flip-flops, which probably had 2 transistors each.

no it didn't

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?

I'd guess around 30,000 "gates" in the machine,
but I could be way off.

not even frickin close.

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.

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"