1.3_January_1994 1.3 January 1994

1.3_January_1994 1.3_January_1994

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January-~Iarch

1994 Volume 1.3

The

Analytical

Engine

NEWSLETTER

OF

THE

COMPUTER

HISTORY

ASSOCIATION

OF

CALIFORNIA

Editorial: CAMPAIGN 1994

The Association begins a new year, and

everything we had dreamed of doing, we're

doing. The

ENGINE

gets

thicker, the e-mail

deeper.

New

computers -well, new old

computers -are lugged to our doorstep.

Delivery vans bring boxes

of

books and

files.

Collaborations are proposed, exhibits planned,

names written excitedly on scraps of paper

and then logged. And under it all the cer-

tainty, slightly awed still:

This

thing

is

working.

We promised to build, from the outset, an

organization with room to grow -an organi-

zation that could start with a

few

like-minded

individuals, and smoothly become a major

voice for the preservation

of

computers and

their history, without spending scarce energy

to rethink and rebuild. The blossom

is

implicit in the seed, the song foresung

by

the

note and the many awaited by the

few.

Well, it does seem that in these

few

months

(where'd they

go?)

the

CHAC

and the

ENGINE

have earned the interest and respect

of an illustrious community. The chorus of

welcome has convinced

us

that

CHAC

can

bloom into a great, broadly representative,

and truly grass-roots organization -even

though right now,

so

to speak, it's still folded

tight.

All signs suggest that growth

is

crucial for

us

-and soon.

CHAC

is

legally established

as

an organization; it

has

an eagerly awaited

newsletter; it's beginning to attract media

attention

(see

SPOTTER;) and,

as

for collect-

ing hardware, software and docs, just read the

ACQUISITIONS column on

page

25.

Really,

it's been almost more than we can keep up

with.

Now

we need size. Size means weight;

presence; recognition; visibility. Size convinces

donors that charitable organizations are .

worthy and credible. Size helps us reach out

to potential members. Size brings down costs

through economies of scale. Size will make

the ENGINE a more attractive, more com-

prehensive newsletter.

And size alone

won't

build a museum -but

it's a key ingredient in the dealing we'll need

to do, between now and 1999.

So

we're calling our

own

bluff. By the end of

1994,

a year from this publication, we want

1,994 new members and

ENGINE

subscribers

for the CHACo Promotions, perks, collabora-

tions, colloquia, prizes, press releases,

or

(even)

a party -whatever it takes, we'll do.

In

coming months, look for mentions of the

CHAC

in the computer and general press, at

trade shows, on bulletin boards -electronic

or

otherwise -and on the net. The more

you

see,

the more it means we're accom-

plishing.

Meanwhile, join, if you haven't. That

is

what

this

is

all

about. That will make the biggest

difference. One person, one subscription, one

check

does

matter.

You

are the spirit, the

meaning, the bootstrap load, the inspiration of

the Computer History Association of

California -because the history we

try

to

save

1S

yours.

You've done the work!

Now

take the credit!

Join the

CHAC

today!

Page 2

The

Analytical

Engine

January-March 1994

PROCLAIM THE DAY

Looking

at

our

science -that ungainly, anar-

chic, thrilling

thing

that even

today

plows so

much

of

its

own

energy back

into

growth

-

it seems so unlikely

that

anyone could rea-

sonably

use

the

words

"electronic computer"

and "fiftieth anniversary" in the same

sentence. But

the

day

is

almost

upon

us;

because

February

16, 1996 will be

the

fiftieth

anniversary

of

the

dedication

of

ENIAC,

the

first

complete

and functional electronic digital

computer

in

the

United

States.

Our

good friend and great resource, Douglas

Jones

of

the

University

of

Iowa's

Computer

Science

Department,

has suggested

that

that

day

should

be

one

of

remembrance and cele-

bration,

to

remind

ourselves -and others -

of

how

far

computing

has progressed in so

short

a time,

how

much

the

world

has gained

from

computing

and computers, and (not in-

cidentally)

how

much

work

it all was and

by

how

many.

Another

phrase rarely found in

conjunction

with

"electronic computer"

is

"pat

on

the

back,"

but

if this revolution

is

fifty

years old and still going strong, it's time for

one.

Given

two

years at

our

disposal, the

CHAC

means

to

run

with

this. We hereby propose,

and

will propose

to

appropriate agencies

of

the Federal

Government,

that

February

16,

1996

should

be proclaimed

National

Com-

puting

Science

Day

throughout

the

United

States. A recognition long sought in itself, this

can also be

an

occasion for forums and pro-

motions

about

computing

science and its

contributions

to

economic production, educa-

tion, research and entertainment.

On

page 78

of

the

electronic

ENGINE,

or

on

the

mailing cover

of

the paper edition, you'll

find a Ballot. Please use it

to

jot

down

and

submit your ideas

of

what

a

National

Computing

Science

Day

could and should be.

IN

MEMORIAM:

TOM

WATSON

Thomas

J. Watson jr., whose foresight and

dedication transformed IBM from a manufac-

turer

of

accounting machinery into

the

world's most formidable

computer

company,

died at Greenwich Hospital in Greenwich,

CT,

on

December

31, 1993.

His

death

followed a

short

illness.

Few captains

of

industry

have faced a more

difficult mission

than

Tom

Watson 'did,

or

carried it

out

with

such strategic foresight and

attitude.

He

was the

son

of

Thomas

J.

Watson sr., first president

of

IBM,

one

of

the

world's

most meticulous visionaries and auto-

cratic managers;

as

Tom

Watson recounted in

his 1990 autobiography,

Father,

Son

and

Co.,

relations between

the

two

were often strained

and perennially difficult.

The

younger

execu-

tive

would

make decisions

with

full awareness

of

their

far-ranging consequences,

only

to

be

overruled

by

the

older one,

who

could

point

to

his

own

record

of

success. In

the

thirty

years between 1922 and 1952, Watson sr. had

built IBM from a modest

producer

of

general

business hardware

into

an

international corpo-

ration that dominated

the

market

for electro-

mechanical accounting machinery.

His

achievement was prodigious.

Yet after

World

War

II,

when

American

business began

to

be intrigued

by

the

possi-

bilities

of

electronic computing, Watson sr.'s

confidence in his

own

methods prevented

him

from offering the necessary leadership. IBM's

first commercially available stored-program

computer,

the

Selective Sequence

Automatic

Calculator (SSEC) , was

an

electromechanical

machine that owed

much

to

prewar

concepts.

IBM was

then

in danger

of

falling

behind

other

companies, such

as

Remington Rand,

which realized that the potential benefits

of

digital computing justified a clean

break

with

past practlce.

January-March

1994

The Analytical Engine Page 3

In January

1951,

at the

age

of thirty-seven,

Tom

Watson bet his own reputation -and

then the whole company,

as

IBM

did time

and again -on comprehensive adoption of

digital technology. The Defense Calculator or

Model

701,

meant for scientific

use

and

discussed

at

length on page 4 of this

issue,

was quickly followed by the Model

702

for

business applications and the smaller Model

650.

The

650

stunned the market by selling in

the hundreds, rather than dozens; it was

IBM's most popular computer model for

many years, and 1,800 were eventually sold.

Lifted on a wave of renewed confidence,

IBM

was then ready for a second great expansion.

The company proved to the world that its

electronic computers shared the legendary reli-

ability of its accounting machinery. Further-

more, because IBM computers used

IBM

tabu-

lators and printers for input and output,

sales

of

the older equipment were helped rather

than hurt when computers were sold.

Tom

Watson had masterminded a strategy that let

his company reap the benefits of both

approaches -the prestige derived from

headlong entry into a new

age,

and the

sales

volume that accrued from extending the useful

life of existing design.

Watson then spent the revenues of this

success on research and development that

would fortify IBM's seemingly unassailable

position. IBM's labs developed ferrite memory

for the Model

704,

transistor logic and circuit

printing for the

7030

and

7090,

the RAMAC

disk memory .... the list

is

nearly endless. Yet

computing technology matured

so

quickly that

by

1960,

in the context of design,

IBM

was

no more than first among equals. Its preemi-

nence in the market was endangered.

In December

1961,

the internal SPREAD

committee recommended that

IBM

should

commit unprecedented resources to develop-

ment of a completely new, internally consis-

tent line of computers. The products of this

commitment might sweep the market,

or

sink

the company. Watson - a seasoned combat

pilot, Alpine skier and powerboat racer -

trusted

his

often daring judgment and con-

curred with the report. The development of

System/360 cost

five

billion dollars; it

was

the

single most expensive American industrial

project in history. But its impact was in pro-

portion. In his definitive

Historical

Dictionary

of

Data

Processing,

James Cortada calls

System/360 "perhaps the most dramatic success

story in the history

of

American products,

even surpassing .... the Ford Model T car." At

the end of

1965,

the first full year that

System/360 shipped, IBM had captured almost

two-thirds of the domestic market for comput-

ing machinery. Under Watson's guidance, this

success

was

repeated, notably with the

Systeml370 introduced in 1970.

The dividends of success were stunning.

In

1952,

when

Tom

Watson assumed the presi-

dency of

IBM,

the company's annual revenues

were about

$300

million; in

1971,

when his

health compelled him

to

resign from the chair

of the board, they exceeded

$8

billion. By

1979,

when he stepped down from the chair

of IBM's executive committee, annual sales

were almost

$23

billion. Watson had

won

his

bet, again and again.

He returned to "private life" and spent his

retirement, so-called, in public service. His

belief that sound diplomacy depended on

honesty and trade, and his affection for the

Russian people that arose from wartime expe-

rience in the Soviet Union, led President

Carter to nominate him

U.

S.

ambassador to

that country in

1979;

he continued in that

capacity under President Reagan. In this occu-

pation and numerous others, Watson demon-

strated that the drive of a renowned

businessman could be tempered and refined

by

the humanity of a statesman.

This text was originally intended.

as

com-

memoration

of

Mr. Watson's 80th birthday,

which he would have celebrated on January

8th, while this

issue

was still

on

press. We

Page 4

The

Analytical Engine January-March

1994

profoundly regret making a more definitive

use

of it. The Association offers condolence

to Mr. Watson's wife, Olive Cawley Watson;

to his children, Thomas J. Watson 3rd,

Jeannette

W.

Sanger, Olive

F.

Watson,

Lucinda

W.

Mehr.an, Susan

W.

Whitman, and

Helen W. Blodgett; to his many

grandchildren, and to his colleagues and

friends around the world.

THE IBM 701

in

CALIFORNIA

Introduction:

In every issue of the ANALYTICAL

ENGINE, we proclaim and celebrate

"computing in California." Why, then,

is

this

issue's big-iron article about the pride of

Poughkeepsie -the trailblazing

IBM

701?

Because,

at

the very outset of the digital

computing era, the

701

conclusively demon-

strated that the Golden State was wild for all

the computer power it could

get!

Bearing in

mind that

only

nineteen machines were ever

built, look at these serial numbers, sites and

delivery dates:

2 University of California, Los Alamos,

NM

March

23,

1953

3 Lockheed Aircraft Company, Glendale, CA

April

24,

1953

5 Douglas Aircraft Company, Santa Monica,

CA May

20,

1953

8 U.

S.

Navy, Inyokern, CA (China Lake)

August

27,

1953

10

North

American Aviation, Santa Monica,

CA October

9,

1953

11

Rand Corporation, Santa Monica, CA

October

30,

1953

13

University of California, Los Alamos,

NM

December

19,

1953

14

Douglas Aircraft Company,

El

Segundo,

CA

January

8,

1954

16

University of California, Livermore, CA

April

9,

1954

18

Lockheed Aircraft Company, Glendale, CA

June

30,

1954

In other words, including Lawrence Radiation

Lab's acquisitions for Los Alamos, over half

the total production went to California pur-

chasers. (Of those, half went to aircraft com-

panies, fulfilling Konrad Zuse's prediction that

digital computing would become a necessity

for aircraft design.)

It's an impressive list, especially since leasing a

701

was a major commitment for even the

largest institution. Anyone

who

wants to

construct the timeline of California's love

affair with computing can anchor the origin

right here. -Editors ]

ORIGINS

AND

LEGACY

OF

THE IBM 701

Douglas W. Jones

Department

of

Computer

Science,

University

of

Iowa

Internet: jones@cs.uiowa.edu

THE

HISTORICAL

SETTING

In January,

1951,

Thomas J Watson jr.,

Executive Vice President

of

IBM,

convened a

meeting in his office to discuss a proposal by

his assistant, J. W. Birkenstock, for a new

computing machine using

CRT

memory with

about

20,000

digits of memory per tube, and

with a clock cycle allowing it to multiply

two numbers in one millisecond. The pro-

posal suggested that up to

30

machines might

be

made, beginning with a single prototype,

the Defense Calculator, under government

contract and nominally a response to com-

puting demands posed by the war in Korea.

At this time there were about twenty elec-

tronic stored-program digital computer projects

in the world,

all

but three using binary

number representations. Most were patterned

after Von Neumann's machine at the

Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, with

January-March 1994 The Analytical Engine Page 5

40

bits per word.

The

Defense Calculator was

planned

with

a slightly shorter word,

36

bits,

and far better

input/output

facilities than the

lAS machine.

The

difference in

word

length

was corollary

to

the selection of a 6-bit byte

when

recording data

on

magnetic tape, a new

storage medium IBM was currently

developing.

The

Defense Calculator was designed fairly

quickly, based

on

the experience with the lAS

machine and

with

early experimental systems

at IBM.

Newly

developed component packag-

ing methods resulted in a machine remarkably

compact for its time.

The

logic was packaged

in 64-pin modules

with

a

row

of 8 vacuum

tubes

on

the front

of

each module; logical

operations were performed by germanium

diodes in the base

of

each module. Modules

were plugged into a backplane, and the design

permitted modules

to

be

swapped while the

system was powered up. The resulting

CPU

occupied a cabinet about the same size

as

was

used

25

years later for the VAX 11/780; a

second similar-sized cabinet held

72

cathode

ray tubes storing

512

memory

bits per tube,

for total

memory

of

1K words.

By April 1952 the prototype Defense Calcu-

lator was fully assembled; within two months,

the complete system was in use and under-

going debugging.

The

first production model

was shipped in December 1952, to IBM's cor-

porate headquarters at

590

Madison Avenue in

New

York, and became an instant favorite

with sidewalk gawkers. The second machine

was delivered to Los Alamos

on

April

1,

1953, and was

working

at the site within

three days. (In the context of this amazing

feat it

is

worth

noting that Los Alamos was

operated

by

the University of California, and

that relations between the university and the

laboratory were far closer then than in later

years.)

Thomas J. Watson sr., preoccupied with his

company's almost sacred commitment to elec-

tromechanical punched-card technology, still

had doubts about the new machine; but they

were probably alleviated

by

the

monthly

rental of a fully equipped 701, which, at

$17,600, was about ten times the price of a

typical family car. His son,

on

the

other

hand, noted that customers continued

to

honor

their contracts even while the

announced rental

fee

more

than

doubled from

its original $8,000.

"That

was

when

I felt a

real

Eureka/,"

he noted decades later in his

autobiography. "Clearly

we'd

tapped a new

and powerful source

of

demand."

On

April

7,

1953, the Defense Calculator was

publicly unveiled at an event attended

by

over 150 guests, including

John

von

Neumann, William Shockley, J. Robert

Oppenheimer, and a roster

of

highly placed

scientists and executives.

At

this event, the

machine was newly described

as

the "IBM

Electronic Data Processing Machines,

known

as

the

701."

A doctored photograph

of

the

prototype Defense Calculator was used in a

two page advertisement in National

Geographic in 1953, referring to it simply

as

"The

New

IBM Electronic Data Processing

Machines."

In early

1953,

the

701

memory

units were

upgraded from

512

bits to 1024 bits

per

CRT,

[was this the first implementation

of

double-

density? -Ed.] and a reference manual was

produced.

The entire planned series

of

eighteen IBM

701's was produced and shipped in

only

nineteen months -from December 1952 to

June

1954

-proving that assembly and

testing of massive, complex

DP

machinery

held few terrors for this uniquely experienced

company. IBM's first venture into commercial

electronics at this scale was accomplished with

the thoroughness that had become their best-

known

trademark. After the eighteenth

701

was shipped

to

Lockheed Aircraft in Burbank,

CA, enough spare parts remained

on

hand to

assemble a nineteenth machine,

which

was

Page 6

The

Analytical Engine January-March

1994

delivered to the U.

S.

Weather Bureau on the

last day

of

February,

1955.

THE

IBM

701

INSTRUCTION

SET

The

IBM

701

had a

36

bit word packed with

two

18

bit instructions. Each instruction had

a 6 bit opcode, leaving

12

bits for the mem-

ory

address. Memory was addressed to the

half-word, so the architecture allowed up to

2K

words, the entire capacity of the upgraded

CRT

memory

subsystem developed in

1953.

The

sign bit

of

each instruction determined

whether

the instruction was being used to

address words

or

half-words. Negative instruc-

tions were

word

addressed, while positive in-

structions were half-word addressed. Half

words were packed into words in big-endian

order, with odd addresses being used to

reference the least significant halves.

Numbers

were stored in signed magnitude

form, and all

of

the documentation assumed

that the values being stored were signed

mag-

nitude fractions, with the point immediately

to the right

of

the sign bit and left

of

all

of

the magnitude bits.

The

machine had an accumulator and a mul-

tiplier-quotient register, and new complexity

was introduced by two extra magnitude bits

at the most significant end

of

the accumula-

tor. These extra bits allowed sequences such

as

"load, add, add, add" to

be

performed

before a check for overflow was needed, and

allowed such sequences to arrive

at

correct

results even

when

intermediate values were

out

of

bounds.

The instruction set included

21

programmIng

instructions and 8

input/output

instructions.

The programming instructions included the

expected load, store, add to accumulator, and

subtract from accumulator instructions, but

also load negated and add

or

subtract absolute

value. As expected, the machine had multiply

and divide instructions, but it also had round

and multiply and round instructions that in-

cremented the accumulator if the most signifi-

cant bit of the multiplier-quotient register was

one. Finally, there were left and right arith-

metic shifts in single and double precision

form and a logical and instruction that oper-

ated from accumulator to memory.

Control structures were constructed by branch

and conditional-branch instructions, but

programmers who wanted to code using pro-

cedures were forced to write self-modifying

code. Conditional branches could branch on

zero, branch

on

positive,

or

branch on over-

flow. A special instruction was included to

write the address field

of

a half-word in

memory, allowing straightforward self-modifi-

cation, and there was a halt instruction.

The

input/output

instructions included in-

structions for starting unit record read

or

write operations, for copying one data

word

to

or

from a unit record, and for sensing

or

setting device status

or

control bits. Special

instructions were included to handle

backwards reads from tape, to write end-of-file

marks on tape, to rewind tape units, and to

set the drum address

of

the next drum

transfer, but the central va instructions were,

to a remarkable extent, equally applicable to

all

devices.

As

noted previously, the sign bit of each in-

struction was used to determine whether the

memory address was a half-word

or

full-word

address, and with a 6 bit opcode field, this

would seem to leave room for

only

32

in-

structions. In fact, the 5 control-flow instruc-

tions were always used to address half-words,

and the 4 shift instructions and va instruc-

tions

did

not

use

the sign bit. As a result,

there was plenty

of

space in the instruction

set to extend the machine

as

later models

were introduced.

January-March 1994

The

Analytical

Engine

Page 7

INPUT

/OUTPUT

DEVICES

The

701

was developed soon after IBM had

constructed an experimental Tape Processing

Machine, and the success of that experiment

encouraged extensive support for 7-track

mag-

netic tape

on

the

701.

The

decision to

support

7-track tape,

with

6 data tracks and

one

parity

track, led

to

the selection of a

multiple

of

6 for the word-length; this tape

format, originating

with

the 701, quickly

became an industry standard that was almost

universal for the next

15

years.

The

701's tape drives could be supplemented

with

a fixed-head

drum

that

allowed random

access to individual words. Each drum unit

had a capacity

of

2048 words, and was clearly

thought

of

as

swap-space and not

as

a device

for storing files.

Other

peripherals offered

on

the

IBM

701

were modifications of standard

IBM unit-record data processing machines, a

card reader, a card punch, and a line printer.

These were all "programmable" peripherals,

with

patch-panels controlling operations

on

the data encountered. All three devices were

limited

to

72

characters per line of data

printed, punched,

or

read, with the patch

panel controlling the mapping between the

72

columns seen

by

the computer and the pres-

entation

of

that data

on

punch

card

or

listing.

Input!

output

was complicated particularly

by

the

utterly

bizarre data formats

of

cards and

print

records.

For

example, cards were read

row

by

row, so that

two

36

bit words

of

input contained one

row

of

data from the

punched card, while the character code used

on

the card used each column to hold one

12

bit character. This comes very close to the

philosophy espoused in Jackson

W.

Granholm's

"How

to Design a Kludge"

(Datamation, Feb. 1962, page

30),

and many

programmers were forced to spend hours

writing code

to

translate between character

data formats.

Another problem with input-output was that

all data transfers were done under program

control, which -assuming moderately high

performance of tapes and drums -placed

stringent timing constraints

on

I/O

code.

On

later systems, the life

of

programmers was

greatly simplified

by

the introduction

of

direct

memory

access

I/O

devices.

THE

DESCENDANTS

OF

THE

701

The

IBM

701

and 702, introduced within

weeks of each other, defined

two

parallel lines

of development for electronic computing, with

the

701

intended for scientific and military

customers, while the 702 was aimed at the

business market. (The 702 was a decimal digit

serial computer descended

from

the experi-

mental Tape Processing Machine; it was

developed in parallel

with

the

701, using

similar technology, but it was

not

related

to

the

701

at the instruction set level.) Watson

jr. understood that

the

701

was, to use

today's term, a "power user's machine," and

provided energetic

support

for the quick

de-

velopment of a more capable successor.

At the end

of

1953,

while

the

earliest 701s

were still being delivered,

Gene

Amdahl -

later well

known

as

the

co-designer of the

IBM

System/360 and

the

founder of Amdahl

Corporation -was

put

in

charge

of

develop-

ing a follow-on to the 701.

On

May

7,

1954,

this was unveiled

as

the IBM

Type

704

Electronic Data Processing Machine.

The

704,

almost three times

as

fast

as

the 701, was the

first commercially available computer

to

in-

corporate floating-point arithmetic, and the

first

IBM

computer to have index registers.

The 704 systems control

program

(SCP) ,

which monitored the progress

of

calculation

and offered program control for

input/output,

can

be

considered IBM's first operating

system.

Perhaps the primary innovation of the new

model was ferrite core fast memory, which

Page 8

The

Analytical Engine January-March

1994

was announced in

October

1954,

even before

the first

704

was delivered. The first core

memory unit for the 704 was installable in

sizes up to 4,096 words; within two years,

32K words

of

core could

be

installed. This

technology contributed much of the 704's

speed and offered greatly improved reliability.

However, the expansion of

704

main memory

to over 2K words posed a problem that pro-

grammers have faced with annoying frequency

on

later machines, that of addressing a large

main memory

with

a small direct address

field.

SHARE

In August 1955, IBM gave a seminar in Los

Angeles,

as

a briefing for potential

704

cus-

tomers. Several executives

who

attended that

seminar met again almost immediately, on

August

22,

to establish a group for mutual

support and pooling

of

information

on

the

704,

called SHARE.

The

rapid growth of

SHARE -possibly the first, certainly a very

early, computer users' group -was particu-

larly important to the success of the

IBM

704.

By the end

of

1980, SHARE had grown to

represent over 1,500 computer installations,

of

which the majority did scientific work.

LANGUAGES

The speed and power

of

the

704,

its register

architecture, and the SCP's ability to perform

low-level grunt work, encouraged the devel-

opment of larger applications which incorpo-

rated subroutine programming. Code reusabil-

ity became an issue, and conformity to agreed

coding guidelines became crucial to this. Even

at

the inaugural meeting, members

of

SHARE

agreed

on

the need for a uniform assembly

language format for the

704;

eventually, an

assembler written

by

Roy

Nutt

of

United

Aircraft emerged

as

the standard.

Higher-level languages also received attention.

As

early

as

late 1953,

John

Backus began to

argue for the development

of

a compiler for

the

704

specifically, and in

1956

a group

under his direction completed this project, by

then known

as

FORTRAN.

Optimized for

numeric calculation, this language offered

unprecedented computational power and guar-

anteed the future

of

the

704

for years to

come. The

72

column limit originally imposed

by the 701/704 card-reader continues to

puzzle

FORTRAN

programmers to this day.

BEYOND

THE

704

IBM

eventually sold

123

Model 704's, a grati-

fying improvement over sales

of

the

701

and

a total that absolutely mandated aggressive

development.

The

704 was followed by the

Model

709,

the last vacuum tube machine in

this series, and

by

the experimental transistor-

ized machine known internally

as

the 709TX.

Borrowing heavily from the advances

of

Project

STRETCH

while remaining fully

compatible with the 709, the impressive

TX

was re-designated 7090

when

the first example

was sold to Sylvania in

October

1958.

The

7094

and

7094

II,

announced in the early

1960s,

were faster still.

WHAT

WAS

ACCOMPLISHED?

The 70x family accomplished more for

IBM

than could, probably, ever have been foreseen

when the original specification was laid down.

It defined a computer architecture that

endured for thirteen years, and might have

lasted much longer. It gave notice that IBM,

long the dominant vendor in tab card equip-

ment, intended to be

as

formidable a competi-

tor

in the lucrative new world

of

computer-

driven data processing. It proved that IBM's

polished sales force could sell computers

as

effectively

as

they had sold

less

sophisticated

products - a transition managed

less

well by

many

of

IBM's competitors. Finally and con-

clusively, it dethroned. Remington Rand

as

the

primary American builder

of

computers.

January-March

1994

The

Analytical Engine

Page

9

The 7094 II marked the end of the line for

the

701

architecture. Lack

of

market was not

an issue; demand for these computers and for

compatibles could have continued for many

years. Rather, the SPREAD report of Decem-

ber

1961

changed the underlying direction of

mM's

marketing policy for computers.

Until

1964,

mM

built two parallel lines of

computers for users in different categories.

Construction for science, higher education and

the military was exemplified by the

701, 704,

709,

7090/94, and

1620,

while machines meant

for business and industry included the

702,

705,

7070,

and the

1401

and its successors.

Naturally, potential customers didn't line up

into the two long neat rows that

mM

would

have preferred, and many users ran "business"

applications on "scientific" computers

or

vice

versa.

mM

never argued with success unless it envi-

sioned greater success. The SPREAD report

warned that, although this two-pronged

approach had resulted in tremendous market

share for

mM,

it entailed wasteful division

and duplication

of

effort internally. The com-

pany's array of niche machines should be

replaced

by

a line founded on a single basic

architecture, with enough gradation in power,

capacity, and peripheral capability to fill the

needs of any prospective customer for an

mM

computer. This idea, and

five

billion dollars,

resulted in the innovative and immensely su-

perior System/360.

Without a doubt, the

360

series justified its

titanic investment

.:.-

the largest in any single

American industrial project to that time -

and went on to become the "greater success"

that

Tom

Watson and Vin Learson had

predicted. But for many computer users and

historians, a

701,

704

or

709x

remains the

machine that quintessentially defines "big

. "

Iron.

REFERENCES

Most of this material comes from

IBM's

Early

Computers,

Bashe, Johnson, Palmer and Pugh,

MIT Press,

1986.

This

book

gives an excellent

overview of

mM's

role in the early part of

the computer era, and it gives moderate tech-

nical detail. Incidental reference has also been

made to Cortada's

Historical

Dictionary

of

Data

Processing,

Greenwood Press,

1987,

and

to

Tom

Watson's autobiography,

Father,

Son

&

Co.,

Bantam,

1990;

the quotation above

is

from page

243

of that edition. [The introduc-

tory table

is

abridged from "Customer Experi-

ences" by Cuthbert

Hurd,

Annals

of

the

His-

tory

of

Computing,

Volume

5,

Number

2,

page

175,

(c)

April

1983

IEEE, and republished

by

permission. -Eds. ]

I have also used

my

1953

copy of

mM's

"Principles of Operation" document for the

mM

701.

This agrees in most places with the

technical appendix in Bashe, Johnson et aI,

but

gives

far more detail

on

instruction timing

and

I/O

data formats. It begins with an in-

troduction to programming that

is

remarkably

timeless; the machine may be obsolete, but

the fundamental material a programmer must

know in order to program in machine

language. has not changed!

Page

10

The

Analytical Engine January-March

1994

DAWN

OF

THE MICRO:

Intel's Intellecs

by

Kip

Crosby

Even sitting

on

a plain formica table, not

powered up, it looks incredibly gutsy and

serious. Thanks to the cheerful cooperation of

CHAC

member Hal Layer,

I'm

looking

at

one of California's -and the world's -first

micros, the Intel Intellec

8.

This sky-blue beauty first appeared sometime

in

1972

or

1973, two years

or

more before

the Altair

8800

often credited

as

the "first

microcomputer"

by

standard histories. Yet

there's nothing tentative

or

prototypical about

the Intellec

8,

whose design and construction

puts many later (and cheaper) "hobbyist"

computers to shame. The story of its origins

is

scarcely known, even within Intel itself.

BACKGROUND

Founded in

1968

by former Fairchild

em-

ployees Robert Noyce,

Gordon

Moore and

Andrew Grove, the Intel Corporation

immediately set to

work

designing and fabri-

cating

IC

memory and microprocessors. The

first Intel micro chipset, the

4004,

was a four-

bit, three-chip combination developed by

Marcian "Ted"

Hoff

at the request of

ETIIBusicom, a Japanese calculator

manufacturer.

The

4004 design was a success, and Hoff

lobbied Noyce to renegotiate the contract

with ETI, securing the right to sell this chip-

set on the open market. Paradoxically, Intel's

marketing department raised objections. The

company's primary volume was

in

memory

chips, which were easily produced and found

an established market; if Intel began

to

sell

microprocessors in significant quantities,

profits might be overwhelmed by increased

support costs.

But Intel had taken a step from which there

was no retreat.

CTC

(Computer Terminal

Corporation, later called Datapoint) commis-

sioned

an

8-bit version

of

the 4004 chipset -

capable of handling an extended-ASCII

character

as

a single

word

-for its line

of

video terminals.

Hoff

and Intel's chief

of

semiconductor design, Federico Faggin, were

excited by the sales potential

of

these micro-

processors and foresaw opportunities for

further development; but the

8008

project

dragged on, and

CTC

cancelled its develop-

ment contract with Intel, eventually awarding

it to Texas Instruments instead. When the

8008

appeared in

1971,

it had cost a fortune,

faced an uncertain market, and already had to

prove itself against competition.

To

find a way forward, the company took

stock of its assets. Intel's highly qualified staff

of electronic designers were experienced at

both chip and board levels, having produced a

wide variety

of

plug-compatible processor and

memory boards for OEM's.

Their

product

line included a complete array

of

support

logic chips. Finally, the company could fabri-

cate

or

outsource other components -chassis,

cases,

power supplies, and input-output devices

-

at

competitive cost while maintaining high

quality. The formidable imperative of the

mi-

croprocessor, bolstered

by

Intel's broad and

deep abilities in production, set the stage for

the Intellec series

of

"development systems" -

which would

be

revealed in retrospect

as

the

first American microcomputers.

January-March

1994

The

Analytical Engine

Page

11

INTELLEC

SERIES

HARDWARE

The

Intellec series of development computers

comprised four models of CPU:

4 Mod 4 4004 chipset

4 Mod

40

8 Mod 8

8

Mod

80

MDS-800

4040 chipset

(a

later superset of

the 4-bit

4004)

8008

chipset

8080

chipset

8080

chipset

Intel maintains that the 8 Mod 8 was first

produced in

1973

and discontinued in

1975.

Tony

Duell has an 8 Mod

80

CPU

board

dated

1972,

and the 8 Mod 8 and 4 Mod

40

are

both

listed in the Intel Data Catalog

published in February 1976, so the actual

period

of

production may have been

somewhat longer. (Pertinent Intel docs must

be

read carefully because the names MCS4,

MCS40, MCS8 and MCS80 were used almost

indiscriminately to refer

to

chipsets, computers

or

full systems.) The number of 8 Mod

8's

built

is

an open question since the company

has no contemporary figures on file, but given

that this author found

only

five in the course

of six months' research, they aren't common.

The

line

of

modules and peripherals, known

collectively

as

the Microcomputer Develop-

ment System, was comprehensive and included

a fast paper tape reader for each

CPU

model;

single

or

dual diskette drives with the avail-

able Intellec MDS-DOS operating system; a

universal

PROM

programmer; two in-circuit

emulator boards and three

ROM

simulator

boards. The Intellec chassis was available

as

a

rack-mountable barebone, supplied with a

CPU

board, RAM board, PROM board, va

board and twelve empty slots.

Adroit combination of these components

could bolster microcomputer development

from initial hardware stages to product proto-

typing; whatever was completed

of

the devel-

oper's system could

be

cabled to the MDS,

which would simulate, emulate,

or

provide

the pieces still on the drawing board. Product

literature emphasized speed and

ease

of use.

The Intellec paper tape readers, "20 times

faster than

[a]

standard ASR-33 teletype,"

would "load

8K.

..

program memory in

less

than

90

seconds." Really impatient customers

were advised to order the MDS-DOS

8"

diskette subsystem and MDS-DRV second

drive, each of which would hold up to

200

files

per

256K

soft-sectored diskette. (This

format, compatible with the ffiM

3540

diskette

reader for mainframes, was later adopted for

the drives of several early

CP/M

micros.)

INTELLEC SERIES

SOFTWARE

The

1976

Intel Data Catalog lists the follow-

ing software available for the Intellec series

,

all written in

FORTRAN

IV:

Cross assemblers: MAC40 for 4040/4004 ,

MAC8 for

8008,

MAC80 for

8080

Simulator / debuggers:

INTERP

/

40

for

4040/4004, INTERP

/8

for 8008, INTERP

/80

for

8080

Language/compilers:

PLIM

HLL, a micro port

of

ffiM's

PL/I

by

Gary

Kildall, with cross

compilers for the

8008

and 8080

All software included a source editor and

docs;

it

was

supplied

on

9-track tape at

800

BPI.

Compiled

or

assembled code could be

tested against the appropriate simulator, then

run on an Intellec computer

or

the devel-

oper's own system,

or

encoded in BNPF

("Begin-Negative-Positive-Finish") format to

burn ROM's.

THE

REAL

ARTICLE

Clearly, Intel's conception

of

appropriate

hardware and software for the MDS was far

broader and more profound than the ideas

governing contemporary development of

so-

called "hobbyist computers." At $2,395, the

Intellec 8 was substantially more expensive

than a later Altair

8800

or

other 8080-based

Page

12

The Analytical Engine January-March

1994

kit computer, but delivered solid value for

money.

Twenty

years after it

was

built,

Layer's 8 Mod 8 looks

as

if it could still boot

and run for another century.

Its dimensions of 7"xl7"x14"

(18x44x36

cm)

make it slightly smaller and taller than a

modern AT-class desktop box, and at

30

lb

(13.6

kg)

it might

be

a bit heavier. It

has

a

very

real front panel, tastefully silkscreened in

white on navy blue, with three banks of

sixteen red LED's:

[Text in

uppercase

is

the actual panel text.]

Bank

1:

STATUS: cpu RUNning, cpu WAITing, cpu

HAL

Ted, console

access

HOLDing, cpu

address SEARCH COMPLete, console

ACCESS REQuested, console INTerrupt

REQuested,

INT

DISABLE [not used on the

Mod

8].

CYCLE:

FETCH

instruction, cpu MEMory

read/write, cpu

VO

read/write, DmA,

READ/INPUT,

WRITE/OUTPUT,

INTerrupt

cycle, STACK [not used on the Mod

8].

Bank

2:

ADDRESS access:

[15

and

14

not used on the

Mod

8,]

13-0

display memory during

access.

Bank

3:

INSTRUCTION

/ DATA:

7-0

display instruc-

tion or data between cpu and memory or

input/

output.

REGISTER/FLAG DATA:

7-0

display con-

tents of cpu data bus

or

register on execution.

above two rows of white rocker switches:

Row

1:

ADDRESS / DATA: MEMory ADDRESS

HIGHer bits for dma,

VO

ADDRESS for

manual

access,

SENSE

DATA

input.

ADDRESS /

INSTRUCTION

/ DATA:

MEMory ADDRESS LOWer bits for dma,

INTerrupt INSTruction for fetch,

DATA

deposit to memory

or

input/

output, data for

load to

PASS

COUNT

register.

Row

2:

ADDRESS

CONTROL:

LOAD

PASS

count

to register, DECRement loaded address

by

one, INCRement loaded address

by

one,

LOAD high and low address to register for

dma.

MODE: cpu input SENSE data,

VO

ACCESS

for edit

at

cpu wait mode, MEMory ACCESS

for edit at cpu wait mode, execute to

SEARCH point and WAIT, enter manual

WAIT state. (Tony Duell's comment on

SEARCH/WAIT: "Very nice feature .... You

could set a trap on a particular location, and

also

set a counter. Then, the

CPU

would be

forced into a wait state on the nth

access

to

that location. Great for single-stepping the exit

condition of large loops.")

CONTROL: single STEP through program or

CONTinue from search complete, DEPosit

8-

bit word during

access,

DEPosit 8-bit word

AT programmed HaLT, cpu fetch/execute

manual INTerrupt, RESET program counter

to zero.

[Switches listed

as

"not used on the Mod

8"

were enabled

on

the Mod

80

only.]

T

a the right of these controls and indicators

is

a combination keylock/power switch, and a

PROM socket! with a power switch of

its

own .... no need to pull the

case

and card

when blowing

or

reading a fresh EPROM on

an

Intellec.

Oh,

and it's a ZIF socket, nothing

new under the sun.

January-March 1994

The

Analytical Engine Page

13

But let's pull the case anyway .... woops .... it

doesn't pull, it's a flip-up

case

with a piano

hinge at the back -something that all too

many micro owners might prefer even today.

Underneath the case, the sides of the card

cage are hinged too,

then

securely fastened to

the frame. Access to components

is

excellent

by

any standard, certainly

by

comparison to

modern

nanotower

cases and postcard

motherboards.

An

early clue to component quality

is

the

startling size of the power-supply capacitor,

as

big

as

a small fist.

The

power supply

is

so

conservatively rated that, when Layer bought

the computer, the seller advised him to

salvage the supply and

junk

the rest!

Other

low-stress components include a giant muffin

fan in the backplate, and the

cage

itself, made

out of aluminum bar stock.

The passive mainboard's sixteen slots run

front-to-back and the slot guides are yet more

satin-finish aluminum. Each modular card

plugs into a full-length hundred-pin connector

(identical to

S-100,

although the connections

aren't,) and

is

supported

by

nylon card guides

at

both

ends; the card guides are riveted to

the crossbars of the cage. Fliplocks at the top

corners of each card protect against creep and

vibration, although I suspect that only a trip

through a paint shaker would loosen a card

accidentally.

Seven standard card modules were supplied

with the S

Mod

S:

immS-S2 Central processor module with

SOOS

CPU,

memory

and

I/O

interface, interrupt

logic and crystal clock

imm6-2S

(x2)

4K

RAM

module: 32x1Kbit

2102

static RAM chips

imm6-26 2K

PROM

module: Sx2Kbit 1702A

static

EPROM

chips, eight empty sockets

immS-60

1/0

module: four S-bit inputs, four

S-bit outputs, a

DART,

and serial

TTY

con-

nectors

imm6-76

PROM

Programmer module cabled

to the 24-pin

EPROM

socket

on

the front

panel

and the control module for the front panel.

Nine slots were left empty.

The

stock

machine was delivered

with

SK

static RAM

and the Mod S system

monitor

(with paper

tape support) burned into the 2K PROM;

by

combining and swapping

other

cards and

chips,

any

combination

of

RAMs, ROMs

or

PROMs could be installed, up

to

the' 16K

ad-

dressable by the

SOOS.

Unusually, RAM and

ROM

boards could be installed globally set to

the same addresses, and their individual chips

then enabled

or

disabled

with

jumpers.

[Available accessory cards included an

Output

module with eight S-bit ports

(S-62,)

a bread-

board for wire-wrap sockets

(6-70,)

and the

6-

72

"pop-up" card with extended connectors to

raise any module clear

of

the card cage.]

The backplate carries

out

the

theme of sturdy

construction.

On

each side

of

the fan mount,

a subordinate cage provides five sockets for

DB37 connectors.

Hefty

3-wire power and a

current loop interface

through

a Jones plug

cater to the anticipated Teletype connection.

BUT

IS IT A

MICRO?

The

Intellec S has been denied the reputation

that it deserves -

as

California's and,

possibly, America's first microcomputer -for

two reasons that I find cogent.

Primarily,

any

SOOS-based

device

is

relegated

to the archaic

age

of

micros. Like

Nat

Wadsworth's SCELBI-SH and Jonathan Titus'

Mark

S,

the Intellec saw

only

limited produc-

tion and never entered the "popular" legend

and culture of computing.

The

SOOS

went

on

to become an embedded processor in Data-

point Beehive terminals and

DEC

PDP-11/34

front-panel boards; its successor the

SOSO

seized its day to power cheap, commercially

available kit-built computers that helped ignite

the micro revolution ... .leaving the

SOOS

to

be

Page 14

The

Analytical

Engine

January-March 1994

part

of

history in a more limited sense,

as

the

preoccupation

of

historians.

Secondarily, the

Mod

8 had an especially

narrow

declared purpose,

as

a system

to

build

systems. It was diffidently marketed by Intel,

which was still

wary

of

selling microproces-

sors in volume to the general public. Cer-

tainly the company's strategy, to create broad-

based demand incrementally through the good

opinion

of

influential hardware and software

developers, was defensible .... especially in light

of the results. But it did mean that awareness

of

the

Mod

8 was limited to a small popula-

tion

of

technical specialists -to those special-

ists, furthermore,

who

thought that the poten-

tial

of

micro development and programming

justified a sizable investment in an MDS

system. In a way, this asked MDS customers

to have more faith in the future

of

micro-

processing

than

Intel itself had. But in 1994

it's hard -almost literally "unthinkable" -

to recreate

the

mindset of respected computer

professionals

who

thought the micro was a

dark horse, a sucker bet, a testbed,

or

a toy.

Only

a handful

knew

what

the micro even

aspired

to,

not

to mention what it would

achieve.

But a computer's importance to history has

never been a function

of

its

CPU

type,

nor

should it be.

And

special purpose

is

no deter-

rent to general fame -certainly ENIAC,

which "only" computed artillery tables, and

COLOSSUS,

which

"only" screamed through

brute-force solutions to Germany's encoded

military traffic, are

two

of

the historian's

all-

time favorites.

The

Mod

8 was a deeply con-

sidered, robustly built, versatile, well-docu-

mented Real Computer™

with

an architecture

heavily biased toward systems development. A

similarly meritorious

Mod

8,

or

better yet

MDS-800, optimized for general computation

or

business programming might have become

the first widely sold commercial microcom-

puter.

One

good look at the Mod 8 will

confirm that Intel could have built such a

machine, if their corporate strategy had called

for one.

Still, there's no need to play "might have

been" with an Intellec,

which

is

a fairly for-

midable box

as

it sits. Like a long-fendered

prewar roadster

or

a Schneider

Trophy

seaplane, it embodies a vanished past

so

pure

that it becomes evocative. Sit for two hours,

if you ever get the chance,

with

a Mod 8 and

its manuals; when you stand up, you'll

know

a

lot

more about computers.

[Thanks to

Tony

Duell, Jodelle French, Doug

Jones, Benjamin Ketcham, Klemens Krause,

Hal Layer, Jay Maynard and "Milan" for

source material, answers and encouragement.

-KC]

RSN: DSP

ON

A Z-80

We

had announced

Doug

Mandell's article

on

early digital signal processing for this issue;

unfortunately, in the interim,

Doug

went

mission-critical and got swept away

by

a code

tsunami. We sympathize (no doubt along with

many of

our

readers) and

look

forward to

publishing this article

when

it's ready. -

Editors

January-March

1994

The

Analytical Engine Page

15

LAND

OF THE SILENT GIANTS:

A

Day

at Livermore

On

October

27,

1993,

we -

Tom

Ellis, Tim

Swan and

KC

-met

at

CHAC's

garage and

rolled up

our

sleeves for the drive. In El Cer-

rito it was a bright, warm

fall

morning; the

heat in Livermore, thirty miles further from

the coast and bordering the Valley'S stony

desert, might be punishing by comparison.

National and local security had dictated that

the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

be plunked down in a sparsely populated

bowl

of

scrubland framed by far hills, cut by

service roads

as

straight and black

as

electrical

tape. It's not the moon but it could easily

be,

say,

New

Mexico

or

Nevada.

Very Federal white-an-blue signs direct the

persevering visitor to "Computer Museum,

Pod F," a small, detached frame building that

the museum shares with a dosimetry lab.

While the museum

is

part of LLNL, the

building it's in belongs to the Livermore

School District, making the installation's status

more precarious than it otherwise would be.

We were met

by

the Museum's curator,

Barbara Costella; the registrar, Alice Pitts; and

the Lord High Fixer, Roger Anderson -

all

volunteers

or

nearly so, and three-quarters of

the Museum staff. (Docent Jim Tracy wasn't

on

deck that day.) This operation has been a

labor

of

love for decades and

is

still consid-

ered somewhat marginal by Powers that Are

in the Department

of

Energy. Which

is

too

bad, because it's one of the most exciting

computer museums in California. "Nationaf

here

is

no passing epithet; you

won't

see

this

collection of hardware, documentation and

ephemera anywhere else.

Ever since it was established in

1952,

LLNL

has performed advanced computation consid-

ered to be in the most stringent national

interest. This loosened traditional limitations

that might have forced some big companies,

or

even other government agencies, to settle

for

less

overwhelming devices. Livermore's

computers have always been the fastest and

crunchiest available, even if they were

ex-

perimental

at

the time

they

were installed,

even if they have

very

low serial numbers,

like

5,

or

6,

or

even One.

Case in point: The Control Data

6600,

announced by

CDC

in August

1963,

was

supposed to

be

delivered to Livermore in

October

1964,

at a cost

of

$3.8 million. It

inaugurated a firm tradition

of

teething

troubles with supercomputers (not unreason-

ably, since

it

launched the category too,) and

it got to the site six months late. But once

it

arrived, it must have liked the weather,

because thirty years later, there it still

is.

The main unit looks like a big, dull-gray

bank vault; in fact, the resemblance

is

eerie,

because you enter it

by

swinging open a

three-inch-thick metal "door." But, surrealisti-

cally, behind the door there's another door,

that swings open too.... These are the compo-

nent planes for 350,000 hand-wired, individual

transistors, mounted in frames that might

survive geological eons.

The

whole box

weighs three tons, and what it required for

power, I can't imagine. Naturally it was

meant to have its own

room

and a Praetorian

guard of tape drives and printers; sitting in

that little school building surrounded by its

descendants, it looks almost aloof and pained,

as

if to say

0/

all

Real

Computers

I

was

the

Most

Real.

For

a while....

The

console

is

a

Formica desk with plenty

of

wing space, a

nice solid keyboard, and

two

big round green-

on-black screens directly in front

of

the op-

erator, like something out

of

a fifties s-f

movie. At the operator's bidding, the fastest

processors of the day, a gargantuan 128K

sixty-bit words of fast core ... .! sat and

imagined that Seymour Cray's looming

maiden effort, the first, the only

supercomputer

in

the

world,

was waiting

for

me to type in

the bootstrap commands and spin the drives.

Page

16

The Analytical Engine January-March

1994

Dizzying. Wrenching! (Later on, the

6600

even acquired LLNL's first hard-disk array, a

gargantuan Bryant with several platters

mounted vertically on a common horizontal

shaft; each platter was

three

feet

in diameter

and held

244

million words of data. The

whole array must have really tried the

patience

of

angular momentum.)

But

all

things must pass, and where more

quickly than here? Because sitting next to the

6600,

and not even

five

years newer

(it

arrived in January

1969)

is

a

CDC

7600,

looking absolutely audacious by comparison ....

a tall column, shallow V in cross-section,

sheathed in dawn-blue plexiglass and unin-

spired woodgrain. Behind the plexi are rows

and rows

of

quick-change aluminum circuit

modules, each a little bigger than a

(US)

pack

of cigarettes, painted black, and with a robust

multipin connector

at

the back end. These

plug into the main backplane not unlike

Legos, and did a great job of minimizing

downtime, because they could

be

swapped out

so

easily.

The

7600

has four times the main

memory

of

its predecessor and probably four

times the speed, but only cost about thirty-

five

per cent more. "Top that," it says, with

every line.

Volumes could, and should,

be

written about

these two machines alone. But walk a

few

steps ....

and there's a CRA

Y-L

..

which just

Is.

A CRA

Y-1

doesn't even look like a com-

puter, unless you know what you're looking

at. The tall column, in a logical (but weird)

development from the

7600,

is

a hollow cyl-

inder with one quarter cut out of it; the

wiring goes around the inside surface of the

cylinder, to be short, and the

access

panels

for the circuit boards

go

around the outside,

for easy fiddling. Flanged around the outside

base

is

what looks like a padded bench,

which earned these computers the nickname

of "loveseat" forever .... it's the casing for the

power circuitry and cooling hydraulics, readily

visible in the example

at

hand, because Ms.

Costella had two segments

of

the casing

neatly replaced with clear plexiglass. Step back

and

be

generally reminded of, say, a strange

phone booth in an airport.

Fast?

You bet. All chips and still couldn't

be

cooled with water, had to use peculiar pink

Freon. Over twice the main memory of the

7600

- a million sixty-four-bit words -and

up to forty times the speed, depending· on the

operation. Seymour's masterpiece; gonzo; long

since replaced by faster machines, including

variations on the same architecture, yet still

considered sort of

....

out

there.

Always will be.

It

was

just too different.

Also, not the computer

you'd

choose to add

up the grocery budget -even

of

a small

country. To begin with, programming was

grueling even for experts, because the whole

language

was

biased toward speed

of

execu-

tion. Secondly, the main computer (four tons

this time) consumes four

megawatts

of

power,

or

about

$720

worth per hour at PG&E's

current prices. The four tons got easier to

understand when Tom slid a circuit board out

of its U-channels and handed it to

me;

I

almost dropped it because the components

were mounted on a sheet

of

solid copper

about

five

millimeters thick. Seymour Cray

has

ideas

about computer design that have

never been subscribed to

by

anyone

else.

This in turn has led to folktales about his

designs being Immaculate Conceptions, after a

fashion, devoid of compromise and devoted to

the speeding electron above all. Well .... yes and

no. Any time you get near people who actu-

ally worked

on

a Cray, you start hearing

furtive whispers about

the

mat,

and how

the

mat

is

why these computers could never

be

mass-produced, because

the

mat used to leave

its

.own

engineers red-eyed with fatigue and

whimpering with frustration ....

January-March 1994

The

Analytical Engine Page

17

The

mat

is

the web of wiring around the

inner surface

of

the cylinder. Here again, in

the

name of truth, justice and insatiable curi-

osity, one of the opaque covers has been

replaced

with

plexi -and behold, this

dreaded mat in all its dire glory.

Not

just

spaghetti, but

boiling

spaghetti, a bramble-

thick mesh

of

overlapping loops covering the

whole panel, uncountable thousands of wires

that would be nightmarish to trace even with

a total schematic.

How

this machine was ever

repaired, I have no idea.

Tim

stood in front

of

that Rosetta Backplane, stock-still and

gaping,

as

if he were waiting for something to

move. This too, at the time of its creation,

was the fastest computer in the world.

From

here we need to step back and look at

some theory, particularly

as

it applies to

Livermore.

The

lab examines very large phe-

nomena at very high resolution; thus it needs

to process input

as

fast

as

it possibly can, if

the results are meant

to

arrive in any reason-

able time. But that's

only

half the story.

Once

these data have been collected and

stored,

they

need to be

retrieved

as

quickly

as

possible, lest these power-sucking, coolant-

fuming

CPU's

get bored.

So

LLNL's most pivotal question -with

some

of

the most fascinating answers -

became rapid access to information. Livermore

began using computers in the days

of

punched-card data storage [see page

4]

and

progressed rapidly to tape; but with its unend-

ing need for vast blocks of data NO

WI!,

it

must have been one of the first installations

for

which

tape alone was flatly inadequate.

Tape

is

reliable, dumb, and forever slow,

because

you

spin the tape

to

every item you

need, and if

you

happen to be nearly a whole

tape's length away, it can take a while. Spin

the drives faster, make the reels lighter, be

ever more inspired about the sequence of

records

on

the tape, and you

only

buy

yourself breathers, because serial access

is

limited in its very nature.

My

friends the

twelve-year-old Visual Basic programmers

would pipe up with

"Why

didn't

they

just

use

hard disks?" and -

they

did and do, lots

of them; but the Lab's need for torrential

flows of information in real time meant that

disk storage, classic nine-track tape, cartridge

tape and optical storage all overlapped in a

chaos of urgency.

Nine-track handling was expedited with

many

devices, including wonderful

robot

arms that

searched through tape cabinets, grabbed

the

desired reel, drew it

out

of

the cabinet, and

auto-mounted it.

CDC

provided the cartridge

tape, and IBM the optical storage, with

devices so innovative (in

very

different ways!)

that they honestly deserve

to

be called heroic.

IBM's photo-optical storage memory, the

Model 1630, held thousands

on

thousands of

strips of what amounted

to

stiff microfilm

carefully slotted

into

small gray plastic boxes;

the boxes had spring-loaded covers and sat in

an array of cells

on

a wall.

When

the com-

puter whistled, the device swung into action,

found the right cell in

the

array, drew out

the box, popped the cover, pulled the right

strip and read the data

from

it optically.

Halfway between tape and a disk, it had one

dimension of serial access and one dimension

of random access, and it was faster

than

tape.

Since this whole machine was finished, sup-

ported and documented

to

Big Blue's usual

standard, and IBM

only

ever built three

of

them, it must have cost a [deleted] fortune.

CDC's

MASS

38500 contained 16,384 plastic

cartridges -not much longer

or

thicker than

your

middle finger -

with

shutters, that pro-

tected short, fat tape strips spring-wound

on

spindles. Each strip held a million of the

sixty-bit words for the 7600.

That's

a

terabit

in the array ....

And

it could find any file in a

second.

Page

18

The

Analytical Engine January-March

1994

All these devices are on display along with a

Concise

History

of

the

Hard

Disk, starting

with a single, millstone-sized, twenty-five-

pound

platter from the Bryant array. From

there the disks got smaller and faster and

smaller and faster .... development chronicled

here

by

a selection

of

platters in several sizes,

all flashing the glossy gold-bronze

finish

that

is

the highest aspiration

of

all rust.

So

it

is

with the whole Museum. Bits of

hardware, from the massive to the tiny, were

plucked off the conveyor belt to the scrap

heap, meticulously arranged and sagely

explained. A full-house PDP-8 concentrator

stands next to its ASR-33 Teletype, and you

can almost hear the clatter; across the room,

one wall

is

devoted

to

an anarchic-looking

PDP-10 (originally used for

file

transport

control) that had

my

fingers itching to

flip

dimly remembered switches.

On

the other end

of

the scale, there are tubes

of

core wire and

little heaps

of

cores in three

sizes:

tiny, tinier,

and where's-the-hole?

Tim

was startled to real-

ize that core planes were assembled by hand;

Tom

said that the display board of core

memory gave the best explanation he'd ever

read, and I imagine he's read a

few.

Further

over, a reel

of

UNN

AC

steel tape hangs

from doubled-up fishline, with

an

Alice-in-

Wonderland sign that says "LIFT ME." In

one corner,

two

Commodore PETs cower like

kittens among cheetahs.

Yet older equipment includes a nice selection

of

IBM

EAM hardware, including keypunches,

summary punches, a sorter, and an early

alphabetic tabulator, all finished in the invari-

able battle-ready gray. I took the control

drum

out

of

the

026

and remembered too

much about odd jobs in college, including the

way the insanely springy metal locking

flap

always chipped one end of the control card ....

Control Data peripherals got rescued too. The

purplish, stair-carpet ribbon of the band

printer will still get

your

fingers very dirty.

The T -handled dust covers

of

the disk packs

still look like cake protectors. It's

all

here,

clean and polished, none

of

it

on

a pedestal

but most

of

it with intimations

of

bootability.

In a world trembling on the edge of mania

for virtual reality, a day's

worth

of real

reality

is

a refreshing and startling change.

But the scavenger's apotheosis

is

the Pro-

grammer's Office in another corner.

As

Leo

Damarodas recalled in last

july's

ENGINE,

while you were coding in the fifties and

sixties you weren't at the console, and this

is

where you were .... at this long oak table,

flanked by blue-on-brown boxes

of

IBM

card

stock .... that's your dark cloth coat and fedora

on the wooden coat-tree. Framed awards and

pictures line the wall,

OEM

models adorn

tops

of

filing cabinets, and a few "internal

souvenirs" -like a nameplate from an

IBM

7094

-are tacked to the bulletin board.

Sitting

at

the long table, puzzling over a cork

in your code, you might idly pick up the

plugboard punch, no bigger than a screw-

driver but superbly finished in gray and red

with the

IBM

logo in white. Then it's back

to the fanfold,

as

you

try

not

to notice the

clock, and reach for the pack

of

Camels in

the ashtray. With the cigs, there are matches

from a Chinese restaurant, emblematic of the

days before ANSI Standard Pizza conquered

the programming world. But it's a pack

of

matches

from a Chinese restaurant in

the

1950's.

Only

love could have accomplished this.

This

is

where you were. Maybe.

Or

maybe,

like my pre-teen object hackers

who

don't

know that a hard disk spins, you never were

and only need to be. Back

to

FORTRAN,

overpunches, absolute addressing, smudged

fingers, the chewy chatter

of

paper tape, and

the sickening thud

of

a card box hitting the

floor. Iron.

Since the dawn

of

computing, LLNL has built

unique systems -like the

CHORS

hard copy

output service, the RJET remote job entry

terminals, the TMDS video sub-network, and

the 50-MHz, multichannel

OCTOPUS

January-March

1994

The

Analytical Engine

Page

19

backbone -to respond to completely excep-

tional needs. All of this had to

be

kept

patched together

by

brilliant improvisational

engineering. As much money

as

Livermore

had,

as

much clout with the hardware com-

panies, still its retrospective history

gives

a

clear impression of scrambling to keep up -

of building levees and dams to channel tidal

waves of information that constantly

threatened to overwhelm the whole network.

Counting

file

data, print jobs, remote job

entry, and output to televisions and CRT's,

the two big

trunk

channels often handled

over half a million messages an hour. There

were

few

parallels to this, no matter where in

the world. And all the history that makes this

understandable, that makes it live,

is

packed

tight into a tiny, borrowed school, protected

-by four diligent volunteers -from the

rote indifference of a government department

on

another coast. Somehow, the Computer

Museum even seems miles away from the

Western-redwood-serene-Zen architecture of the

Lawrence Livermore Visitor Center, which the

DOE

does

care about.

To

speak plainly: This Museum needs protec-

tion -the protection of fame which arises

from recognition. Visitors, ink, and word of

mouth and keyboard can keep this unrivaled

historical asset from declining to "hardware in

storage" and slipping away.

Make the appointment, take the drive, prowl

and exclaim, stand and stare. You'll love it.

We

did!

Lawrence Livermore Computer Museum

Pod F

North

1401

Almond Avenue

Livermore.

CA

94550

Hours

by

appointment only

+ 1

510

447-6109

or

+ 1

510

373-1373

LONG

LIVE

the

APPLE

II

April 1977 -

November

1993

Apple Computer

has

announced the end of

production for the Apple IIe, the last Apple

n model still available from the company's

educational catalog. After almost seventeen

years and over

5.5

million machines, this

dynasty

is

brought to its end.

When the Apple II was introduced at the

First Annual West Coast Computer Faire, in

San

Francisco's Civic Auditorium, on April

16,

1977,

it marked a risky departure for the

fledgling computer company. Apple's earlier

product, the Model

One

[see

ACQUISI-

TIONS] had enjoyed a modest success; it was

powerful for its day, well-designed, and

reliable. However, it was a hobbyist's

computer that required the proud owner to

add a

case,

a power supply, and

I/O

capabil-

ity; it was also expensive, at nearly USS700

for the main board alone. Roughly

200

units

were sold.

The Apple II was intended for a far wider

audience. A revision

of

the "insanely great"

Apple One motherboard, combined with all

the bits that made it an operable computer,

was housed in a sleek, tapering beige

case

that

evoked fleeting thoughts

of

science-fiction

movies. It was meant

to

appeal

to

hi-fi buffs

and buyers

of

modern appliances, and at

USS1,195,

it could almost qualify

as

an

impulse purchase. Apple's three top executives,

business manager Steve Jobs, circuit designer

Steve

Wozniak, and president Mike Markkula,

hoped that this would become (to borrow a

later Apple slogan) the first-ever "computer

for the rest of us."

It came close.

So

many people found it attrac-

tive; computer professionals who wanted a

machine

at

home for recreation, executives

who realized that an Apple II running Visi-

Calc

Til

was

an analytical

tool

more agile than

any minicomputer, students

who

wanted to

Page

20

The

Analytkal

Engine January-March

1994

edit papers without retyping, administrators of

clubs and churches

who

ran their mailing

lists ....

An

Apple

TI

brought the power of

computing to so many familiar activities,

slowly perhaps, but easily too, and without

being scary.

Roughly a year after the Apple

TI's

introduc-

tion, Apple brought out the Disk

TI

5.25

floppy drive, a stroke

of

genius that may

even have surpassed the computer itself.

Earlier floppy drives had been hardware-heavy

and complex, which made them expensive,

finicky and fragile. The Disk II reduced

hardware to an absolute minimum and trusted

to software for control and timing, keeping

the drive affordable (though still a major

moneymaker for Apple) and reliable enough

for the mass market. At a stroke it banished

the bitwise mysteries of paper tape and the

eternal frustrations of data cassettes, and

brought speedy data retrieval to millions of

delighted users.

Over

the years -so many years - a proces-

sion

of

new models brought more capability

to faithful users. The

TIplus

and

TIe

added

memory and agility. The

TIc

made (or tried to

make) an already small computer explicitly

portable. The

TIGS,

by

adding vastly improved

color graphics and the beginnings of true

digi-

tal sound, brought the family to the very

edge

of today's infatuation with computer-

driven "realities." But while these descendants

pushed the envelope, they never tore it.

If

you've ever run one Apple

TI,

you can sit

down at a different one and at least get off to

a good start. Almost every model has its par-

tisans -mention of the perennial

TIe

brings

smiles from teachers, while some designers still

call the IIGS "the best [deleted] computer

Apple ever built" -but they're

all

inviting

and ingratiating.

In the end, perhaps the

IT's

greatest contribu-

tion was to . education. Millions of children

have encountered a

TIplus

or

TIe

on the same

day they began primary school; and the

mag-

nitude of this contextual shift

is

hard to over-

state. In the popular imagination of

1975,

a

computer was a vast, wildly expensive, unap-

proachable cluster of machines, hovered over

by

specialists in an air-conditioned room. Ten

years later, a computer was something that a

seven-year-old could walk up to, play with for

ten minutes, and wander away from. Without

giving Apple credit for the entire micro revo-

lution, we can still admit that that dilatory

child was

probably

playing (and learning) with

a

TIe.

(And a

few

of

those seven-year-olds

grew into twelve-year-olds

who

could run

MS-

Windows

or

Finder, and are

now

sixteen-year-

olds messing with Linux

or

hacking

C+

+

.... but that's a different story and only begun.)

The educational market finally faded, the

TIe

accounted for only two per cent

of

Apple's

shipments in

1993,

and the

TI

series

is

at last

a closed book. With the

turn

of

the century

so

close, it's a shame that we

won't

see

an

Apple

TI

Millennium Edition. But no doubt a

few

hundred thousand

of

the originals will be

pumping bits in the year 2001, proving that a

6502

chip and a pocket calculator's worth

of

RAM still add up to a useful, amusing and

beautiful computer.

Long live the Apple

IT!

January-March

1994

The

Analytical Engine Page

21

A DECADE OF MACS

While we're under the Apple tree, happy

tenth anniversary

of

the Macintosh! which

was introduced to the world on January

24,

1984.

In those ten years the Mac

has

-time

after time -set new standards in digital

sound and graphics composition, video

ma-

nipulation, and ease

of

use. Few feelings in

the world

of

computerdom are

as

intense

as

the devotion

of

a hard-core Mac user.

We'll

try

to have a Mac artide for April, but

we

don't

know

what's in it yet. Have faith.

(Speaking

of

the apple tree, here's a trivia

question: What was the text, in tiny letters,

that ran around the edge of the picture frame

in the original Apple logo? First correct

answer before March

28

gets published in the

April issue.)

SPOTTER ALERT

On

November

24,

1993,

the

CHAC

office

prepared a press kit that consisted of a release

about INITIATIVE

1999

and the Association,

a copy

of

the short piece entitled "Millennial

Chaos for Computers" that appeared in the

November 15th

New

York

Times,

and a copy

of the October-December ENGINE. This

mailing was

our

first contact with print

media.

Kits were mailed to these publications:

Byte Government Computer News

Computer Currents Information Week

Computer Technology Review Info World

Computer World Mac Week

Data Communications MicroTimes

Datamation

PC

Week

Defense News , ,Science

Digital World T.H.E. Journal

Dr. Dobbs' Journal Whole Earth Review

Electric Engineering Times WIRED Magazine

Federal

Computer

Week

If

you spot any mention of

CHAC

or the

ENGINE

in

one of these periodicals,

please:

*

If

your copy of the piece

is

dippable, clip

and mail

to

the El Cerrito address.

*

If

you can't spare the physical copy, send

the text

as

net.mail to cpu@chac.win.net,

or

photocopy and

fax

to the El Cerrito address.

*

If

you're too busy for that, just send the

publication name, date and page number and

we'll do the hunting.

Thanks!

SPOTTER FLASH

At the moment before publication,

our

press

campaign has brought its first results. Emery-

ville's

Computer

Currents

Oanuary

11-24,

page

10)

devoted a quarter-page to a fair and clear

treatment of INITIATIVE 1999. We appreciate

the coverage.

It was their editorial decision to publish

CHAC's

voice number -rarely used, to put

it mildly -rather than

our

more popular

e-

mail address.

We

were startled when the

garage got pelted with

phone

calls!

Our

callers

had several interesting propositions

or

sugges-

tions and, if this exemplifies the power

of

the

press, we're all for it.

Thanks

again.

THINKING OF WRITING? ...

.... an article for the

ENGINE?

We'd be

de-

lighted to have some, but even more delighted

to have some about:

1.)

Minis. A sober assessment

of

our

first

three

issues

demonstrates that we've published

a lot about big iron, a lot about micros, and

not much at all about minicomputers -

which have been crucial to all manner

of

research, simulation, programming, automa-

tion, process control, and hackerly weirdness.

Minis are Good Things and we

know

that

many of

our

correspondents share that opin-

ion.

So,

dear readers, what interesting things

Page

22

The

Analytical Engine January-March

1994

did

you

do with one? In California, of

course.

2.)

Scarcer large machines. We're very fond of

IBM and

DEC

both -having had forebears

who

were spear carriers

on

both sides of the

Hardware Wars -but no

less

fascinated by

machines that weren't quite

as

ubiquitous.

Certainly there's every reason to write

proudly and at some length about the room-

ful

of

Amdahl,

AT&T,

Burroughs, CDC,

Cray, Data General, Datamatic, ERA, GE,

Hewlett-Packard, Honeywell, NCR, Philco,

PRIME, RCA, SDS, Sperry, Tandem,

UNIVAC, Xerox,

or

What-did-I-Miss? iron

that

you

cut

your

teeth on.

So

when can you

start?

3.)

Distinctly historical machines in current

use.

To

take one beguiling example, a couple

of

ENGINE

subscribers would

swear

that

some large company in California

is

still using

a System/360.

Is

this true? Who'd like to

prove it?

4.)

Languages. We recognize that it isn't easy

to write about languages in a way that holds

the interest

of

non-programmers, but we did

get a terrific response from Aaron Alpar's

Smalltalk article in October. Comparable

treatments

of

other dialects eagerly solicited.

5.)

Computer-related social and economic

his-

tory.

The

tremendous impact of computing in

California has comprised far more than hard-

ware and software.

Why

did you

go

to

work

for a computer company, when you

did?

What were the effects when

your

hospital,

or

bank,

or

university adopted its first EDP? Just

as

a computer

is

more than the sum

of

its

components, computing

is

more than the sum

of

its computers.

DESPERATE PLEA FOR

MONEY

CHAC

needs money. What else

is

new? Well,

what's new

is

that we're getting some .... not a

tremendous amount, but enough to produce

the ENGINE, pay for postage, telecomm and

storage, and very, very cautiously purchase

significant hardware.

CHAC

is

in the black -

for the moment -and here to stay.

When we take the strategic view, we re!llize

-and hope you'll concur -that the need

for ready cash

is

greater than ever. The

process outlined in October,

of

"forging links

with trade publications, industry executives,

and foundations .... in a word, being taken seri-

ously," has begun; see this issue's

" Acquisitions," "Spotter Alert," and "Land

Of

The Silent Giants" for examples. We've

also

begun to recruit

our

Advisory Board.

In the near future, we will be starting

research into foundation support, filing grant

applications, traveling

throughout

California to

meet with industry representatives, and trying

to rescue some larger hardware. We're consid-

ering a public, promotional event at mid-year

to celebrate the first anniversary of the

ANALYTICAL ENGINE; later in

1994

we

may collaborate on a significant publishing

project. This will all take

money

that we

don't have now. But if we mean to fulfill our

ambition of "getting

much

bigger over the

years," we don't dare squander the momen-

tum that

CHAC

has built up in

only

nine

months.

To

those who have donated:

Thank

you,

you've kept

us

moving.

To

those who

haven't, yet: Please give

soon

and make the

biggest difference you can. Microeconomics

is

an unforgiving science, and tomorrow's dona-

tions have a hard time paying today's bills.

January-March

1994

The Analytical Engine

Page

23

AND

SPEAKING OF

MONEy

....

With respect to

our

nonprofit certification,

the mills (and stores) of pertinent gods are

grinding very slowly indeed -it seems like

months since that paperwork went out of

here. Happily, the

CHAC

can act like a

nonprofit while it's still waiting to become

one.

Our

accountant says that, since our

ap-

plication

is

correct and pending,

all

donations

to the Association are fully deductible for the

donor. This includes

ENGINE

subscriptions.

(The

$10

per year surcharge for paper copies

can't be deducted because it's a reimbursement

of

our

production and mailing costs.)

If

you don't have an

ENGINE

subscription

yet, but you're hunting for charitable deduc-

tions,

all

we can do

is

encourage you to

subscribe. Today -did we mention today?

LIGHT A

MATCH

....

One

thought about donations: Your gift

to

the

CHAC

could be augmented -even

doubled -

by

your employer through a

matching program. Computer-related compa-

nies offering to match charitable gifts include:

Adobe Systems, Inc.

Ampex Corporation

Cra y Research

Digital Equipment Corporation

William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

mM

Corporation

Macworld Communications, Inc.

Microsoft Corporation

NCR

Corporation

The Sun Microsystems Foundation

Tandy Corporation

TRW, Inc.

United Technologies Corporation

and, no doubt, there are many others. Ask

your company's Personnel

or

Benefits office if

matching

is

offered; if so, please take a

moment to request the appropriate form,

fill

it out and mail it with your donation.

OVERVIEW OF BUREAUCRATIC

PROCESSES

The

last

quarter of

1993

didn't produce much

on this front -largely because the easiest

work had already been done. Much

is

on

its

way to completion, visible results are scant.

But here's what we hope to have accom-

plished by April:

* Certification

of

California nonprofit status

* Application for Federal ditto (which we

can't

do

till the state's certified papers are

returned to

us)

* Application for a nonprofit postal permit

(mailing the

ENGINE

is

expensive)

* Research on grants and filing

of

proposals

* Contact with Bay Area colleges and univer-

sities to discuss a possible internship

* More formal accession and registration of

our computer collection

* Acquisition

of

more storage space,

somehow!!

Naturally, more will come to light between

now and then. And no, we still can't take

credit cards.

Page

24

The Analytical Engine January-March

1994

ABOUT

YOUR

OLD,

DUSTY

LAPTOP ....

If

you have an older

386SX

or

386DX laptop

computer sitting around, and you're not doing

much with it, would you consider donating it

to

the

CHAC

so

we can trade it for some

fine old iron?

A nonprofit organization in Northern Cali-

fornia has been given an elaborate, significant

and bootable Compupro micro system,

complete with a fourteen-inch hard disk. They

can't really use it, because no one on the

staff

is

familiar with it.

They

don't want to

scrap it, for reasons obvious to

us

and to

you. And -here's that bureaucracy again -

because it's donated material, they can't

sell

it

or

give it away, except to

another

nonprofit

organization.

They, on the other hand, desperately need a

portable computer that they can

use

for on-

site demos.

They'd

be

perfectly happy with

some sort

of

386

that had about

an

80MB

drive and a mono screen. If we

had

such a

thing, we could donate it to them ("another

nonprofit organization") and trade it for the

Compupro. Given that Bill Godbout's

Compupro company spent its entire life in

the Bay Area, it's thoroughly within our

mandate

to

acquire this.

If

you have a Toshiba

3100SX

-

or

some-

thing like it -that you could donate to con-

summate this deal, please call

us

at

+ 1

510

527-7355

or

send e-mail tocpu@chac.win.net.

We'll give you a tax deduction equal to the

laptop's current AmCoEx close price, which

should

be

about $650. Thanks!

Book Review:

STAN

VEIT'S

HISTORY OF THE PERSONAL

COMPUTER

Asheville, NC: WorldComm,

1993

Photos, Index,

304

pages,

$19.95

Reviewed

by

N.

C.

Mulvany

Stan Veit's

History

of

the

Personal

Computer

presents and expands a series

of

columns that

have appeared during the past eight years in

Computer

Shopper.

Veit writes that "This

history

is

intended to give the reader the

feeling of the times when, in a

few

short

years, the personal computer appeared and

grew to

be

a mighty force for change," and

feeling

is

a key word; this book succeeds

ex-

ceptionally at conveying the atmosphere sur-

rounding early microcomputing.

The charm of this book resides in its very

personal account

of

personal computing, and

of the industry that developed from it. This

is

no dry historical tome that outlines the pro-

gression of

PC

development machine by

machine, but a chatty insider's account of

some people, places, and technology that were

most important to "computing for the people"

in

precisely its most dynamic, anarchic era.

Veit's story begins in

1976

with the optimistic

opening of his Computer Mart in

New

York

City -the first retail computer store

on

the

East Coast and the second one in the world.

"Started in the back of a

toy

store on

New

York's Fifth Avenue, it grew

so

quickly that

the customers and shoppers filled

the

entire

floor and interfered with the sales of Barbie

dolls and wind-up cars."

The description of retail sales, assembly, main-

tenance and support of systems such

as

IMSAI

8080,

South West Technical Products

(SWTPC)

6800,

SOL computers, and Apple

computers

gives

a vivid picture of

comput~r

retailing at its very outset, constantly veermg

from excitement to frustration and back again.

January-March

1994

The

Analytical Engine

Page

25

Cash flow was a problem not only for the

retailer, but for small manufacturers, who

depended

on

cash to produce the systems

ordered. Often the retailer had to pay up

front for systems sight unseen and hope that

they would

be

delivered within a reasonable

amount of time. Once the systems arrived,

technicians worked overtime to assemble them

and make them bootable. This

was

indeed

risky business! And for every computer like

the

IM:SAI

8080

-the

dark-horse bestseller

that got Computer Mart up and running - a

seemingly comparable machine like the Sphere

M6800 might prove to

be

a near-total flop.

Veit's account

is

punctuated with anecdotes

and many wonderful photographs of early

systems, and his prior background

as

a tech-

nical writer

is

used to good advantage.

Technical developments and specifications

are

integral, but presented in "plain English"

so

as

not to disrupt the flow of the story.

[Unfortunately, the book's most distracting

faults are timid editing and slipshod proof-

reading, which could easily have been

avoided. -Ed. ] He also chronicles the chaos

and thrill of early computer shows, followed

by the maturation of an industry with the

emergence

of

PC

distribution channels. His

tenure

as

publisher and editor

of

Computer

Shopper

gives him authority to delineate the

important role that computer publications

played in the development of the

PC

market.

This book

is

an unfolding, meandering, first-

person story best read cover to cover,

as

if

sitting in Stan Veit's living room and listening

to him reminisce. Its allure

is

hard to describe

in

a review, but typified by Veit's memorable

description of setting up

at

the first national

computer show in Atlantic City in

1976.

Computer Mart shared its booth with a "long-

haired hippie and his friends" -Steve Jobs,

Steve Wozniak, and Dan Kottke.

As

Jobs

was

readying the Apple display, Veit's formidable

mother-in-law noticed that his jeans were

torn. She looked him up and down and said,

"Young man, your backside

is

sticking out of

holes in those jeans! You are

NOT

going to

be

in

my

booth like that. Take 'em off and

I'll

sew

them up, now!" Unusually meek, Jobs

slid behind a curtain and handed over his

pants for mending.

Particular companies and their products are

given in-depth treatment. Proceeding from the

MITS Altair and IMSAI

8080.

Veit describes

the SWTPC

6800,

early Apples. the

Cromemco

S100

boards and whole systems,

Sphere systems, SOL computers,

TRS-80,

Commodore, Atari,

North

Star, Osborne,

Vector Graphic, and the rise of the

mM

PC.

Many other computers such

as

the

DEC

Rainbow, Sinclairs, Heathkits, and Morrows -

to name a

few

-are considered more briefly.

Even so, there are omissions and near-omis-

sions -only three sentences are devoted to

. the notably popular Kaypro

CP/M

machines.

Printers were clearly Veit's favorite peripheral

equipment, and we are reminded that early

Centronics dot matrix printers, which cost at

least

$2,000

and

as

much

as

$6,000,

could

be

an investment that dwarfed the computer

itself. The arrival in

1981

of the Epson Model

70,

selling for

$600

and printing at

60

cps,

was a key breakthrough and universally

acclaimed.

This book wraps up with the introduction of

the mM PCjr in November

1983,

but says

comparatively little about IBM's entries in the

field. This

is

nQt

the definitive history

of

the

personal computer, but a valuable addition to

the collective history, a bird's eye view from

inside the whirlwind

of

activity that spawned

a revolutionary industry.

In

these days of

telemarketing, credit cards, and overnight

delivery it

is

easy to forget how much devo-

tion and effort microcomputing consumed

as

it began. Stan Veit's unparalleled perception of

the early days leaves us absolutely amazed

at

the changes and advances

of

the past seven-

teen years.

Page

26

The

Analytical Engine January-March

1994

ACQUISITIONS

APPLE

ONE

A generous donation from Larry Tesler, Chief

Scientist

of

Apple Computer, underwrote the

Association's purchase of an Apple

One

from

Winston Gayler of Cape Coral, FL. Naturally

this

is

any

collector's favorite Apple, but it's

also a printed-circuit design so pristine and

uncompromising that it's still used

as

a

teaching example in serious EE courses.

Gayler was

as

careful with this computer

as

he was with the IMSAI discussed here in

October; the Apple arrived with a complete

spare chipset, sealed original manuals with

duplicates for reference,

as

well

as

cassette

software, program listings, schematics, corre-

spondence, articles, magazine

ads

.... It's all

here, and to spare. We haven't booted it

because we

don't

have the right kind of, er,

TV set. Look for a full-length article

by'

an

appropriate Apple guru in a forthcoming issue

of the ENGINE!

50L·20

The Association purchased a Processor

Technology SOL-20 from Dave Coughran of

Turlock, CA, with funds donated

by

Tom

Ellis.

Walnut side panels?! What

is

this,

stereo

equipment?!

Actually, the adornment was

less

frivolous than it seemed. When Bob Marsh

and Lee Felsenstein introduced Proc Tech's

SOL computer, at

PC

'76 in Atlantic City,

NJ, a year and a half had passed since the

Altair 8800 was announced in

Popular

Elec-

tronics;

and the rule of thumb about micro-

computers, that a new generation would

arrive every eighteen months, applied firmly

even then.

The SOL-20, built -like earlier Altair and

IMSAI machines -around the Intel

8080

CPU, needed to stand out from a growing

herd of workalikes. Worse yet, Zilog's new

and potent Z80 chip threatened to dent the

sales

of

all 8080-based machines indiscrimi-

nately. Proc Tech's highly regarded memory

and

110

boards proved that their circuit

~esign

was sound, but in the fiercely competi-

tlve market of microcomputing's

Big

Bang,

good internals weren't enough to sway picky

buyers.

So

Marsh, Felsenstein, and partner

Gary Ingram broke new ground

by

making

their computers .... pretty. .

Polished wood end-plates, a high-quality bright

blue finish, and a

CPU

with

an integrated

keyboard all contributed

to

the SOL-20's taut

and "businesslike" appearance. With the moni-

tor on top of the CPU, and the Helios

(persci) twin 8-inch floppy drive next to it,

the whole assembly would fit

on

a -

somewhat lavish -secretarial desk, and

without a dangling cable in sight. Proc Tech

photographed just such a setup to use in their

own advertising, with the caption "Introducing

the Monday Machine."

But in May

1979

Proe Tech closed its doors

forever. The unreliability

of

the Persci disk

drives had wounded it; a long, damaging liti-

gation over the ownership

of

the company's

BASIC had brought it low; and aloofness

from the SOL's user and dealer base finished

it off. Lee Felsenstein and Bob Marsh went

on to

work

for Osborne, where Felsenstein

led the design team

of

the Osborne I.

The SOL-20 itself was largely without blame

for Proe Tech's collapse. It was highly

regarded for its reliability, compactness and

good looks; the surviving examples have

become some of the most sought-after of the

pre-Apple micros. We're certainly glad to have

ours.

January-March

1994

The

Analytical Engine Page

27

ALSPA

A little-known ALSPA microcomputer

has

been donated to

our

collection by Jack

Brown of Adaptec Corporation.

We haven't popped the

case

on

this one and

we

know

only that a 280

CPU

somewhere in

the box talks to the standard

64K

of RAM.

The

case format

is

unusually deep and

narrow, leaving room enough in the front

panel for two

8"

drives and not much more.

There's a nice assortment of ports

on

the

backplate.

Minimal,

or

fewer, docs are part of this

package, but there's probably a boot disk. At

a rough guess we would date it between

1978

and 1980. The full and unrestrained gratitude

of the

CHAC

will devolve

on

anyone who

tells

us

more about this computer than

is

set

forth here.

HP

150

Revenue from subscriptions to the

ANALYTICAL

ENGINE

was used to

purchase a Hewlett-Packard Model

150

touch-

screen computer from Dave Lee of San

Francisco, CA.

The

year

1984

was marked by a creative high

tide that has rarely been equaled in the micro

world. Speaking of hardware alone,

it

saw the

introduction

of

the

IBM

PC

AT, the Apple

Macintosh, the Sinclair

Quantum

Leap, the

Coleco ADAM, and this

HP

150,

among

many others. Naturally some

of

these

machines were more innovative and successful

than others; but few can have been more in-

novative than this H-P.

When Hewlett-Packard implements a new

technology, they generally pursue its devel-

opment until they

feel

that the customer can

receive maximum benefit from it.

So

it was

here. The touchscreen was coupled with an

unadorned, but effective, graphical applications

suite that (for example) lets the user touch

the "tab" of a Rolodex card to display its

contents. Similar attention to detail

is

evident

throughout the design and it's obvious that,

by producing a touchscreen computer that

was intuitive and rewarding to

use,

the

company hoped to introduce a world-beater.

The

150

was not that. Instead, it became one

of the last computers to be doomed by lack

of "IBM compatibility" .... But, ten years after,

how fascinating it

is

to explore a micro

so

different from the common run! -because

the touchscreen

is

only one of its idiosyncra-

sies.

An optional thermal printer could fit on

top of the CRT, under a hatch in the com-

puter. The floppy disk subsystem uses the

(then) scarce 3.5-inch disks, compact and

rugged;

5MB

and 15MB hard-disk subsystems

were also available and could be daisy-chained.

The keyboard has scads

of

color-coded func-

tion keys to facilitate its use

as

a diskless

2623A terminal. Clearly this

is

a "multi-envi-

ronment" computer meant to be equally at

home in an

MIS

department, a library, a

laboratory, an examining room,

or

in the

field.

This

HP

150

is

the Association's first

Hewlett-Packard computer. It

won't

be the

last and, if they typically have this much to

offer,

we

may need quite a few.

[Note to

MIS

packrats: We have an abiding

vision that the 15MB disk, model HP45660A,

the

5MB

disk, model HP45655A,

or

the

wedge thermal printer, model HP2674A, are

sitting in somebody's stockroom, dusty but

functional.

If

you have such things and no

longer need them, we would

particularly

ap-

preciate donation of the rest of the bits for

this box.]

Page

28

The

Analytical Engine January-March

1994

MACINTOSH

XL

(MacLisa)

Al Kossow

of

Apple

Computer

has donated

an Apple Macintosh XL to the Association's

collection, and it's been hanging out

on

the

desk in

our

office ever since! This mysterious

machine, a vital way-station

on

the road to

the Macintosh, was meant to bring the

graphical, iconic, mouse-oriented Lisa interface

to home and business users -but at a price

that

the

desktop

computer

customer

of

1984

would find attractive.

The

XL has the same case

as

a Lisa, with an

11"

(28cm) paper-white

monitor

on

the left

and the floppy

on

the right; but whereas

most Lisas had dual 5.25 "twiggy" drives of

dubious reputation, the XL has one double-

density 3.5 drive.

Ours

also has an external,

5MB ProFile hard disk sitting on top. (At the

moment, the ProFile

won't

cold-boot, but a

patient approach will trick it into warm-

booting.

Once

it's up, it runs indefinitely.)

We have it set up

with

the surprisingly

complete Lisa Office System -LisaCalc,

LisaDraw, LisaGraph, LisaGuide tutorial,

LisaProject, Lisa Terminal, Lisa Test diagnostics,

and LisaWrite -but we could also run

MacWorks XL, an integrated application

written specifically for the hardware.

This machine

is

impressive, and the more

so

the more

you

look. First of all, its click-to-

load windowing and its tear-off-the-pad file

metaphor make it an uncorrupted descendant

of

the Xerox Alto and

other

P

ARC

com-

puters. Consider also that in

1984

this Mac

competed in the marketplace with the

IBM

PC

XT

or

some

of

the later, more powerful

CP

/M

systems -which may have had bigger

disks,

but

couldn't come near the XL's futur-

istic interface. Want to look back from

today's perspective of MS-Windows,

X-

Windows

or

OS/2? Well, the whole Lisa

Office System runs in 512K RAM and fits

on

half

that 5MB disk .... And, when

you're

done

for the day,

you

can hit the power switch

without closing anything.

The

operating

system will meticulously

put

everything away

for you, and bring it back

out

when

you

return in the morning.

Someday, sadly, we will have to

put

this

computer in storage, and some other

intriguing box

on

the office desk. But we're

in no hurry.

ATARI800

At press time -literally

on

the eve

of

the

upload -the Association received a fully

equipped Atari

800

from Shellie Stortz of San

Francisco. It includes a 410 cassette recorder,

a Wico joystick, and one peripheral we hadn't

seen before, a CX85 numeric keypad.

This Atari arrived

in

a bedraggled but still

garish pink-and-silver box that proclaimed it

to be

"THE

PROGRAMMER,"

so presumably

Atari BASIC

is

its forte. We

don't

know

a

lot about it,

other

than

that

its dual cart slot

and real keyboard make it a much more con-

genial machine

than

the smaller

400,

and that

it seems to have 48K RAM.

Of

the documen-

tation in the box, some applies to the 400

and the rest

is

puff.

If

anybody

has real Atari

manuals that

they're

not

using, we'd welcome

the donation.

Anybody

with

Atari manuals

that they

are

using, please call us

or

leave us

net.mail to discuss

the

box's capabilities.

January-March

1994

The

Analytical Engine Page

29

LETTERS

COMPUTER

HISTORY

ASSOCIATION

OF

DELA WARE BEGINS!

..

Well, I've started the process. I registered

the name "Computer History Association of

Delaware" this afternoon -it's funny, you've

got to check a set

of

ledgers to ensure that

the name hasn't already been registered. I

would have been

very

surprised if I'd found a

match in the

1901-1925

ledger

:-)

....

Would you

be

willing to forward

me

a copy

of

your Statement

of

Incorporation and organ-

izational bylaws

as

a starting point for discus-

sions? In Delaware, you only need a single

person for incorporation and no assets .... It's

occurred to

me

that if you get a flood

of

interest in starting other state organizations,

it

might be worthwhile for me to put together a

set of boilerplate applications materials for

incorporation in Delaware ....

Let

me

know

what you found useful (and

not) in setting up the organization in

California.

Now,

where did I put those

RK03

drives ...

Thanks!

-

Tony

Eros, Digital Equipment Corporation

[Thanks to you, Tony!

As

I write this we've

already sent

you

some material by net. mail,

but

as

we look back over the process of

assembling this organization, there's been a

whole lot to it -even

so

far.

As

we

build

the

CHAC,

we'll put together -and

try

to

update - a suggestion

file

which will

be

available from our request daemon.

PLATO

AND

SMALLTALK

..

While we're

on

the subject of Smalltalk,

here's a bit of history the world

is

forgetting:

In the mid 1970's, there were only two or-

ganizations in the world

with

a large body of

experience working

with

bit-oriented graphics.

The group we remember best today

is

the

group at Xerox, working with the Alto com-

puter, the Smalltalk language, and various

ex-

ploratory windowing environments. The other

group was centered

on

the University

of

Illi-

nois PLATO IV computer system. This

system supported close to a thousand interac-

tive terminals, each

with

a plasma display

panel where the rest

of

the world expected a

CRT, and it supported the

TUTOR

pro-

gramming language, a dismayingly mixed

blessing, with very high level input output

facilities geared to the bit-addressable plasma

panel, and control and data structures straight

out of the stone

ages.

The two groups developed their ideas about

how to handle bit addressable display

hardware quite independently, but in the mid

1970's they got together and traded visiting

staff members, hoping to learn what

they

could about each other's best ideas. Both sides

clearly had some excellent ideas, too. Xerox

had windows, mice, the object oriented para-

digm, and the fundamental idea of bit-mapped

CRT displays, while

PLATO

had notesfiles,

input judging, touch-panel input, and the flat

panel bit addressable display.

The exchange was lopsided, though. The

PLATO people

who

went to Palo Alto found

Smalltalk to be impossible to learn. The

reason

was

that,

as

TUTOR

programmers,

with background in other languages like

FORTRAN

and BASIC, they found object

orientation almost impossible to grasp.

On

the

other hand, the Xerox people visiting Urbana

picked

up

TUTOR

very quickly, complained

about its backward control structures and data

structures, and very quickly came to appreci-

Page 30

The

Analytical Engine January-March

1994

ate the brilliance

of

its dialog management

tools.

The other side

of

the coin

is

also

interesting.

The

people

at

Xerox were being funded

largely out

of

a hope that they would provide

a new technology for the "automated office of

the future". In doing this, they put in too

much time trying to provide computer analogs

of the paper tools

of

a conventional office.

While the Xerox community talked about

electronic memo distribution in very learned

tones,

they

tended to miss the fact that digital

communication could take off in an entirely

different

way

that bore little resemblance to

the

way

we communicate with paper and

typewriters.

The

PLATO

project was intended

as

an

ex-

periment in computer aided instruction, and

they were so set in this orientation that they

used the

word

"lesson" for what all of the

rest of us would call a program.

PLATO

had

a large on-line user community, and interac-

tive multi-user games were the single most

intensive application through the 1970's,

despite a string

of

official policies discouraging

such use. In this context, there was no effort

to mimic the paper and pencil world; instead,

as

user demand grew, and

as

tools succeeded,

they were improved on.

The

result was a world

of

inter user commu-

nication based

on

E-mail and notesfiles, where

a notesfile

is

exactly analogous to a news-

group

on

USENET

today.

From

their start in

1973,

Notesfiles were moderated, but the need

for unmoderated notesfiles emerged very

quickly. Because

of

the educational setting, the

PLATO

project ended up taking a very

mature stand about the need for anonymous

postings

(a

stand that

is

far more mature than

the stands currently being taken by the

ma-

jority

of

Internet sites today).

Another example

of

this was the PLATO on-

line user's manual, AIDS. The AIDS system

was entirely non-linear from its start in

1973.

Today,

we

would call it a hypertext docu-

ment, but that term had yet to spread from

California to the interior.

The

PLATO

man-

ual was never intended to be linearized into a

paper document (although that was eventually

done), and the interconnected structure

of

AIDS was a marvelously effective way to

present information.

I was at

TIlinois

from

1973

to

1980,

working

with PLATO but not for it.

My

MS

project,

in

1976,

was a re-implementation of the

TUTOR

language

on

a minicomputer; this

was the first implementation

of

TUTOR

on

any machine other than a

CDC

6600.

This

write-up centers on what I learned at lectures

by the visitors from

XEROX

PARC,

as

well

as

being based

on

my

own

visits to

XEROX

research facilities and

on

my

memory

of

what

other

PLATO

people said about their experi-

ences during the

PARe

PLATO

exchange.

-from Doug Jones, via Internet

INVENTORY

OF

HAL

LAYER'S

COLLECTION

• Outstanding!! Wonderful Vol.

1,

No.2!!

Enjoyed it immensely. I agree with other cor-

respondents in feeling alone in the pursuit

and rescue of artifacts before

they

were

thrown out

by

companies too involved with

survival and the future to be concerned with

the industry's history.

I have been collecting in the categories of

calculators, video games, and computers. for

several years.

If

of

value to

your

readers, here

is

my list of acquisitions, so far, in the com-

puter category, with

my

best estimate of

dates.

computers ......................... .

1956

Heath Electronic Analog Computer kit

(front panel only),

(Heath

1964

EAI analog computer, Model TR-20

(EAI)

1971

Compumedic analog computer,

(Compumedic)

January-March

1994

The Analytical Engine

Page

31

1972

GRI Minicomputer, Model 99/IIB

(GRI)*

1973

Intel Intellec-8 micro, CPU:

8008,

(Intel)

1974

Intel Intellec-4-40 micro, CPU:

4040,

(Intel))

1974

Scelbi-8H Mini-Computer, CPU:

8008,

(Scelbi)

1974

IMP-16P. micro (front panel only), CPU:

IMP-16, (Natl Semicond)

1975

HP

3000,

Series

IT,

minicomputer (front

panel only), (Hewlett Packard)

1975

IBM

5100

Portable

Computer,

CPU: IC

module,

(IBM)

w/cart dr & printer

1975

Altair

8800

micro, CPU:

8080,

(MITS)

1975

Sphere-l micro, CPU:

6800,

(Sphere)

*

1976

Altair

680b

micro, CPU:

6800,

(MITS)

1976

IMSAI

8080

micro, CPU:

8080A,

(IMS

Assoc.)

1976

Sol Terminal Computer-20, CPU:

8080A,

(processor Tech)

1976

SCIMP Development

Sys.,

singleboard,

CPU: SCIMP, (Natl Semicond)

1976

Intel 80/10 singleboard micro, CPU:

8080,

(Intel)

1976

Intercept, Jr. singleboard micro, CPU:

IM6100, (Intersil)

c.1976 2-80 Starter Kit singleboard micro,

CPU: 280,

(SD

Sys.,

Micro Design)

1977

Byt-8 micro (front panel only" CPU:

8080A,

(Byte Inc.)

1977

Byte

8080

micro, CPU:

8080A,

(Byte

Inc.)

1977

COSMAC VIPsingleboard micro, CPU:

1802,

(RCA)

1977

E&L MMD-l singleboard micro, CPU:

8080,

with BUG Books,

(E&L)

1977

Apple

IT,

Model

"0,"

with "Language

Card", CPU:

6502,

(Apple)

1977

Home-brew one-bit micro, CPU: MC-

14500B

c.1978

Am-2900

micro (singleboard), CPU:

2901,

(Adv. Micro Devices)

c.1978

Microcomputer-in-a-Suitcase Trainer,

CPU: NEC8255,(Integrt Camp.

Sys.)

*

c.1978

IASIS

Computer-in-a-Book,

(singleboard), CPU:

8080,

(IASIS)

1978

SPARK.-16

micro w/cassette recorder,

CPU:

9440,

(Fairchild) *

1978

Instructor-50 micro, CPU:

2850

(Signetics)

1978

SYM-l micro, (singleboard), CPU:

6502,

(Synertek)

c.1979

Microcomputer/Terminal, Model

ESAT-

200B,

CPU:1802 (ElectroLabs) *

1980

Sinclair 280 micro, CPU: 280, (Sinclair)

1981

Osborne

Modell

portable micro, CPU:

280A, (Osborne)

1981

28 BasiclMicro Computer (single-board),

CPU: 28, (Micro Mint)

1982

Timex Model

1000

micro (Sinclair 2X81

design)

1983

TRS-80,

Model

100,

portable micro,

CPU:

80C85,

(Tandy)

1983

Sinclair

1500

micro, CPU: 280A,

(Sinclair)

1984

Apple

ITC

micro, CPU: 65C02, (Apple)

computer-related miscellany ................................ .

1948-?0

Library of computer literature,

manuals, pamphlets, etc.

1966

Lockheed mechanical digital timer

(USAF)

*

c.1970

Dektak Inspection/Scriber machine

[w/microscope for IC Wafers] *

1970

Comp-U-Kit

10

(Sci.

Measure., Skokie,

IL)

1971

Pulsar LED digital watch (Hamilton)

1972

Desk-top

IBM

card reader, Model

D-1S0

(Documentation, Inc.)

1973

Pop Electronics Digital Logic Microlab

(SWTPC)

1974

CPU board with

4004

(pro-Log Co.) *

c.1975

Intel System Interface & Control

Module MCB

8-10

*

1975

Microsoft black paper-tape programs,

BASIC,

etc.

c.1976

Processor Technology paper-tape

programs,

games,

etc.

c.1976

Processor Technology & Godbout

boards .

1975

Paper-tape readers, mscl.

c.1978

Intel keyboard, Model MDS-CRT

Page

32

The Analytical Engine January-March

1994

c.1978 Pro-Log

80

(tester of

8080

CPUs) *

*

If

anyone has documentation or information

for these items

(*),1

would like to hear from

them.

Hal Layer, AV

/ITV

Center,

S.F.

State

University 1600 Holloway Ave.

San Francisco,

CA

94132

voice ph:

415

338-2637

email: hlayer@sfsu.edu

DETAILS

OF

STANFORD'S

COLLECTION

..

In the editorial of

ENGINE

#2,

you wrote:

"But at the moment, there's no such institu-

.tion in and for California. That's the ration-

ale,

or

part of it, for CHACo Certainly

Sili-

con Valley, in order to tell the story of what

happened there since Hewlett and Packard

built their first oscillator in

1938,

could

endow and support an institution comparable

to TCM!"

In fact, Stanford has had a "Stanford and the

Silicon Valley" project in the Department of

Special Collections since

1985.

We have

dozens of archival collections relating to the

history of computing, the semiconductor

in-

dustry, physics, etc. Since you mentioned H

& P, one should also

be

aware of the

archives at H-P. Stanford's collections have

been widely used and are well known to

historians of science and technology.

We

have a modestly informative brochure,

which I can send

to

anyone who requests it.

Also,

see

my article in ARCHIVES

OF

DATA-PROCESSING HISTORY: A GUIDE

TO

MAJOR U.S. COLLECTIONS for a

description of the computer-related archival

collections we have

(as

of

1990)

..

-from

Henry

Lowood, via Internet

IBM

DISK

DRIVES, AND OTHERS

..

It

is

interesting how some generic terms

creep into our language no matter how tech-

nically precise it

is

supposed to be. [In

ENGINE

#2,]

Laurence Press refers

to

the

IBM

1301

disk

as

being a "Winchester disk

subsystem". If you check with the people at

IBM

San Jose where all

IBM

disk subsystems

were designed from 1957 to the recent past,

you will probably find out that the term

"Winchester" applies

to

a single technology

developed in late 60's. It

is

derived from the

development project's code name. Each new

system,

or

subsystem, developed at

IBM

was

given

an

internal code name before it was

given a unit number ID, like

1301

for a disk

or

7094

for a computer .... During the late 60's

IBM

was

developing a new series of disk

drives with the main technical objective of

storing

at

least

30

megabytes and having an

average

access

time

of

30

milliseconds

or

less,

so

it was known

as

the

30-30

a

fa

"Winchester" rifle fame. The Winchester

performance advance could only

be

achieved

with a new read/write head technology, so

any disks made with this head technology

have commonly been called a Winchester

disk. (What

is

strange

is

that newer head

technologies have been developed since then,

principally "Whitney" for the peak,

as

in

storage/performance goals; but we still call the

resulting disk a "Winchester".

Why

is

that?)

So,

the

1301

wasn't a Winchester; the IBM

3340

was the first in a long family of

IBM

"Winchester" disks. Maybe someone out there

knows what the

1301

development code name

was;

after all, the

1300

series disks provided

the

basis

for the explosive groWth of the

IBM

San

Jose facility.

I hope that people affiliated with this organi-

zation might find a way

to

record the views

of the disk drive pioneers who reside in this

area, especially

IBM

veterans

or

Al

Shugart,

who worked for

IBM

and then went on to

found one

or

more

of

the disk drive manufac-

January-March 1994

The

Analytical Engine Page

33

turing companies in the Valley. I can still

remember seeing Mr. Shugart's first

8"

floppy

disk drive at the San Jose Labs. Maybe

he

has

one

of

them

or

the drawings. It was elegantly

simple, especially the track positioner, and the

reason it was designed at all

is

especially in-

teresting,

not

what

you would have predicted

considering the industry that it spawned along

with the single chip microprocessor. It would

have made an apt segment of the

"Connections" series.

-from Dean Billing, via Internet

MORE

ON

THE

1401

(passages headed with

....

are from

Damarodas part

2)

....

The

only

way

you could get the machine

to do something was put a deck of cards in

the card reader and hit the start button. And

that would read the card deck, load the

program into memory, and start executing it.

It was slow; there was no multi-processing, no

nothing. Just a really simple machine.

..

As

Leo well knows [and

as

he mentions

later], this isn't right. What the start button

did was read

*ONE*

card from the card

reader

[as

he said into locs

1-80]

and started

executing at location

1.

The first instruction

was always "set

word

mark, 7,

13"

or

something like that. A word mark delimited

the end of an instruction [the

1401

had vari-

able length instructions]. By setting

two

[one

was at the end

of

the first instruction, itself,

of

course] it marked the

second

instruction,

which [as I recall] was also a set word mark.

In fairly short order you got to reading in

another card.

....

Yes, in fact the bootstrap program didn't

even take a whole card. The bootstrap

program was about a dozen characters long.

Somewhere I have a framed white poster,

about four inches high and ten or twelve

inches long, with that program written on

It.

..

It'd be neat if he could find the bootstrap

and post

it!

1'd

be

tickled to

see

that old

code again! But I think

he

has

it

wrong about

the length. I quite clearly remember that the

first two instructions in the bootstrap were

'set word mark' instructions, each seven bytes

long.

-from Bernie Cosell, via Internet

....

Did

the

IBM

1401

use

the

ASCII

system,

or

was

it

EBCDIC,

or

did it

have

...

?

.. ..

The memory locations

~ere

set up looked

just like an

80

column card -plus two more

bits.

So

there was a bit that represented zero

through one, eleven and twelve, which were

the zone overpunches, and

then

there were

what was

known

as

the record

mark

and the

word mark.

They

were two

other

memory

...

well, what we would consider bits.

They

weren't called that, but

memory

looked like a

punched card

with

two additional positions.

Each memory location was like a column

on

a card. The addressing structure used three

positions to represent lK. But then you had

overpunches, and I

know

the overpunches

were used on the left and the right ... there's a

combination

of

four overpunches, so you

can ...

Is

five enough to get up to sixteen?

Yeah.

If

you had

no

overpunches, it would

be

zero through a thousand.

or

zero through

nine-nine-nine. I can't remember exactly what

the scheme was, but they used the over-

punches to make up the difference.

..

The

1401

used a 6 bit "byte", appropriately

named BCD for binary-coded-decimal. The

core memory in the

1401

was actually an 8

bit system because it included a parity bit and

there was a Word Mark bit in each character

that defined field length.

Six

bits was enough

to encode

64

characters

or

enough for the

standard

48

character set that was a product

of the TAB machine days,

26

alpha characters

(CAPS),

10

digits, space and

11

special charac-

ters such

as

comma, period, dollar, $ * ( ) -

+

=.

(Which

is

enough

to

do accounting

Page

34

The

Analytical Engine January-March

1994

clearly.)

The

other

character was the record

mark.

Word

mark was a bit in each memory

position, but record mark was a specific bit

combination.

The

bits were labeled:

C -

(~heck

or

Parity bit)

B -

(1

think

these were called zone bits, but

they

didn't

really correspond

to

the "zone"

A - punches

of

the tab card, rows

11-12.)

8

4

2

1

M -

~ord

Mark)

on

the machine lights. You would need a

1401

programmers card to convert from the

12

rows

of

the tab card to the 6 bits

of

BCD.

Mr.

Damarodas' recollection of address-

ing

is

accurate.

The

1401

used "decimal"

ad-

dresses using 3 "bytes" from

0-999,

then used

combinations

of

the B & A bits

to

extend

addressing

up

to whatever the maximum

installed core

memory

was, [which] I

suspect .... was

16

or

20K (and this

K=

1000).

The

1410/7010 series was the same architec-

ture and 1 have heard of them having 40K of

core. Obviously, if

you

used all

18

bits avail-

able in three characters, you could address

256K characters, but there may have been

some

other

limitation

on

the bit combina-

tions. I remember that it was a rather arcane

system and it seems

to

me

the limit was

lOOK.

-from

Dean

Billing, via Internet

..

What

was the origin of the convention

that a column

binary

card was identified by

the presence

of

a

7-9

punch in column

1?

It

was well-established

by

the time I first met a

binary card in 1962, but I've never run into

any comments about *why* that bit pattern

was chosen. Was it just an arbitrary pattern

selected because it cannot occur in the

BCD

character set?

-from Joe Morris, via Internet

MORE

ON

SPACEWAR

(passages headed

with

....

are from Robinson)

..

..

Each ship could be rotated clockwise

or

counterclockwise, fire reaction engines that

eventually ran

out

of

fuel, and fire missiles of

finite range and finite number.

The

ship

obeyed

Newton's

laws, accelerating and decel-

erating under the influence

of

its engines and

of solar gravitation ....

..

But one thing it *didn't* do was do grav-

ity

on

the

torpedoes, and so there were a

LOT

of sexy techniques that

took

advantage

of that anomaly. Also, Scott didn't mention

the wonderful Starfield. Peter Samson had

added it to the original SPACEWAR.

IT

was

a *real* star field, generated

by

some incredi-

bly clever code so that it had real constella-

tions in their real positions and

they

slowly

drifted across the background.

.......

Collision

of

two

ships produced a

vivid, graphically depicted explosion

on

screen, and both players were out, whereupon

the game restarted.

..

One

should

probably

note that for folks

weaned

on

'Star Wars' and Super-VGA

PC

games, it wasn't really 'vivid'. Kind

of

a little

star-burst. Very nice, and crystal-clear

what

had happened. But nonetheless fairly simple.

....

The display was a vector-type

CRT

and

the quality

of

the

graphics exceptional.

The

motion was perfectly smooth,

with

no

aliasing

artifacts noticeable.

..

This

is

just wrong.

The

display was a

*point*plotting*,

no

memory

scope. ALL

displays were 'animated' since there was no

display memory: if

you

wanted something to

persist

on

the screen, you had

to

be in a

loop constantly redisplaying it.

The

scope had

a neat, special

phosphor

which displayed

green

when

fired, but then faded for short

while in yellow. This made the display flicker

a *lot*

less,

and it also meant that things left

January-March

1994

The

Analytical Engine Page

35

'trails'

as

they moved around. It made for

some quite wonderful

3-D

effects.

-from Bernie Cosell, via Internet

..

The SPACEWAR to which I refer was run

on a

PDP-liB

at BBN in Cambridge. ((one of

the) first Timesharing machines -but that's a

different thread)

I believe this was the identical SPACEWAR

to that run on the MIT PDP-l; certainly

many

of

the same MIT programmers worked

at BBN too.

(See

hakmem threads also).

SPACEWAR at BBN was probably the first

"object oriented" program (nothing new under

the sun), the program had translate, explode

and rotate, etc. generic object functions that

would operate

on

whatever object you

fed

to

them (mostly the two ships).

The DECScope had

64(?)

intensities

(6

bits?).

Peter Sampson programmed a rather remark-

able Starfield over Cambridge, that rotated a

24

hour day

(in

about an hour of play time)

as

the background. (when last heard from,

Peter was at System Concepts who were

making

-10

-20

clones)

Standard (no bit diddling) SPACEWAR was 2

ships, sun with gravity for ships not torps,

8(?)

torps with life about 3/4 screen (about

2-

3 inches/second); hyperspace survival probabil-

ity started at about

75%

and decreased per

use

to about

20%

(?),

everything wrapped, torps

could

be

shot down

by

other torps. T orp

speed was additive to shooter's speed (by

some function) but you could shoot yourself

down if you fired ahead whilst going too

fast,

or

you could "leave mines" by firing opposite

the way you were going. All this in 4k of

18-

bit PDP-l words (including Peter's Starfield

database)

Control was accomplished using testword

switches

(I/O

instruction readable) the 4 on

the left for one ship, the right 4 for the

other. (order may

be

wrong, but ... )

rotate left rotate right torps

(Actions a whole lot like Netrek)

left A right = Hyperspace.

thrust

Program had patchable locations that con-

trolled number of torps at a time and their

spacing,

life,

and speed. Also, rotation could

be

"by thruster rocket"

or

"by gyros" -

Gyro would rotate while the switch was

thrown and stop when off, whereas Rocket

rotation would start and increase angular

momentum while the switch was still thrown.

To stop, you had to

try

to thrust the other

way for exactly the same time.

The sun had switchable gravity and I think

you may have gotten a choice whether torps

were affected

by

gravity. SPACEWAR ships

and torps would wrap, although that may

have

been another option.

For

a challenge,

there was billiard SPACEWAR; single shot on

the screen at a time, no kill counted unless it

had wrapped at least twice.

PDP-l SPACEWAR was the source

of

the

first computer-induced medical problem (well

before Carpal Tunnel Syndrome), "Spacewar

Elbow." Occasionally Cosell (Bernie) and I

would spend a night playing SPACEWAR,

only to find that leaning on the elbows for 7

or 8 hours straight would leave

us

unable to

straighten our arms for quite a while.

BBN

outlawed SPACEWAR occasionally,

mainly because switches died. The life of

testword switches was shortened

by

this game.

(it

took

me

5 hours to replace the first switch

that needed fixing; I got it down

to

22

minutes

by

the time the machine left.)

Someone posted that the

PDP-l

at the

computer Museum was one

of

the MIT

machines, I believe that too.

(It

has joystick

control boxes)

-from Paul M. Wexelblat, via Internet

Page

36

The Analytical Engine January-March

1994

..

I ran into SPACEWAR when I was a

freshman at MIT in 1962/63, and added a

couple of lines of code to it.

(I

have no idea

what those lines were, nor if they were

in-

cluded in any versions after I left. I

do

have

the source listings (promised to the Computer

Museum) but I hadn't yet learned the concept

of footprints to mark changed code.)

When I first saw it the user interface to

SPACEWAR was a pair of wooden boxes

about the size of a small

file

card box, each

of which had two telephone key switches

(turn left/right, rocket on,

go

to hyperspace)

and a button (fire torpedo). When we got the

second PDP-1 someone went over to Eli

Heffron and Sons (mono: "We have Surplus

Surplus") and bought a pair

of

Air Force

drone controllers to serve

as

input devices.

And the PDP-1 we ran it on was really

an

amazing box: Memory of

FOUR

K!

(well,

actually that's 4K words of

18

bits each), and

a blazing memory cycle of 5

uS.

The game was

so

popular that it "signed" the

console log itself: You might

see

entries for

an

hour

or

two for the staff programmers, a

block here and there for a student, an

occa-

sional

Big

Name (Marvin Minsky, for

example), and huge blocks of time merely

noted

as

"Spacewar."

When we got DEC's first drum

(Wow!

32

tracks, each of which held exactly one core-

load of

4K

words!) one of the tracks was

in-

stantly dedicated to SPACEWAR, and the

console load tape for it shrunk to a bootstrap

a couple of

feet

long.

-from Joe Morris, MITRE

COMPILATION

PROJECT

..

For the entire 1960's, most of this informa-

tion [requested for the Compilation Project]

can

be

gleaned from the June

issues

of Com-

puters and Automation -that was their

annual "directory"

issue

that printed a direc-

tory of the entire computer industry.

-from Doug Jones, via Internet

LOGO'S

TURTLE

..

.. ..

as

near

as

I can tell, the original turtle

was a remarkable little robot that crawled

around the floor under

LOGO

control! It had

a hemispherical plexiglass top, two wheels,

and a pen, and it could drive forward, rotate,

and lift

or

lower its pen

und"er

command of

the

LOGO

system. I've seen photographs.

As

I understand it, the split screen came later. I'd

love to program a real

LOGO

turtle!

-from Doug Jones, via Internet

APPLE II DISK

CONTROLLER

..

I have often read about the supposed

unique simplicity of Steve Wozniak's disk

controller for the Apple

II.

According to

most of the material on the subject, Woz

created the

basis

of

his

controller long before

he actually studied the standard methods of

floppy control. Apparently his resulting con-

troller used far simpler methods

to

handle

disk functions than any other controller on

the market. Can anyone out there give

me

a

good, technical explanation of Woz's method

for controlling disk drives

as

opposed to the

more conventional approaches?

-from Don Congdon, via Internet

EARLIEST

NETWORK

TOPOLOGY

CITED

..

Concerning the citation of the Pierce Loop

in

Aaron Alpar's article,

ENGINE

#2:

A

timeline for network history that I have been

developing includes the entry :

1969

NewHall

LAN

topology (token ring)

as

the earliest instance of token ring LANs. I

believe this was some British work based on

Cambridge slotted ring networks. Unfortu-

January-March

1994

The

Analytical Engine Page

37

nately, I do not currently have the reference

for .... this citation .... Anyone familiar with

sources for these

LAN

developments? I have

it that Ethernet (the term coined

22

May

1973

by Robert Metcalfe) was based on Aloha

radio network protocols, and token rings

descended from Cambridge rings, which tried

to remove the media contention in Aloha by

assigning each station a unique time slot for

data transmission. Verification would

be

appreciated.

-from Stan Kulikowski

II,

via Internet

GUI

ON

A XEROX

STAR?

..

I have just prepared a

class

lesson on the

GUI

design and its place in human-computer

interfaces ... .in this lesson I describe how the

GUI

was developed at Xerox P ARC circa

1970-73

on the Alto.

is

there a source for

getting screen images of the original Alto

GUT?

I would like to show how this evolved

into the standard designs we

see

today. I

understand that the Xerox STAR was in this

line

of

descent, but I have no sources on how

the

GUI

figured in there.

-from Stan Kulikowski II, via Internet

[Before

our

press time,

Lee

Wittenberg had

suggested "Designing the Star User Interface"

by David Canfield Smith, et

al.

originally

published in BYTE, April

1982,

and reprinted

in Perspectives on the Computer Revolution,

edited

by

Pylyshyn and Bannon (Ablex,

Norwood

Nj,

1989).

We'd like to suggest

getting in touch with Larry Stewart at the

DEC

Computer History Project,

stewart@crl.dec.com. ]

RE:

DAVID

HEMBROW'S

OLD-IRON

QUERY

..

Concerning David Hembrow's request for

"Old Iron" specs (ANALYTICAL ENGINE,

Vol.

1,

No.2,

October

1993),

you should

be

aware

of

the surveys of computer hardware

done by the military.

They

appeared in three

separate editions:

Office of Naval Research.

A Survey of Automatic Digital Computers.

Office of Naval Research, Washington,

1953.

I have the second printing,

with

revisions, of

this, which

is

dated November 1954 and specs

nearly

100

computers in

109

pages. The later

editions were:

Martin

H.

Weik.

A Second Survey of Domestic Electronic

Digital Computing Systems.

Ballistics Research Laboratory Report

No.

1010.

US

Department

of

Commerce, Office of

Technical Services, June 1957.

439

pp.

Martin

H.

Weik.

A Third Survey of Domestic Electronic

Digital Computing Systems.

Ballistics Research Laboratory Report

No.

1115,

Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland.

Department

of

the Army, March 1961.

1131

pp.

This final version

is

a massive work, fully

illustrated. These are hard to find in the

second-hand book arena, but are all readily

available through inter-library loan.

-from Dr. David

B.

Sarrazin, University of

Colorado, via Internet

[Thanks, Doctor! You may be interested in

this card from

our

reference database:

A

FOURTH

SURVEY

OF

DOMESTIC

ELECTRONIC

DIGITAL

COMPUTING

Weik, M.

H.

Ballistic Research Laboratories Report Number

1227

Aberdeen Proving Ground, 1/1964

This

is

as

cited in

H.

H.

Goldstine's PASCAL

TO

VON

NEUMANN,

page 120 in both the

1972

hardcover edition and the 1980/83

paperback; Princeton University Press. ]

Page

38

The

Analytical Engine January-March

1994

COMPUTER

MUSIC

ON

A PDP·g

• Some hackers at MIT in the middle

60s

actually wrote a note generation system for a

PDP-8. With the system, you could input

sheet music and it would play on a standard

AM radio.

WTBS (the ORIGINAL WTBS -broadcasting

with 5 watts from high atop Walker Memo-

rial at MIT) used to play Petula Clark's

"Downtown" recorded via the above.

-from Jim Ebright, via Internet

MUSIC

ON

A

CDC

3300

• The

CDC

3300 had a loudspeaker under

the console/desk, and it was wired in to the

top three bits of the A-register. You could get

a max-volume sound, even a clean note,

by

toggling the A-register (bits

23,

22

and

21

-

it was a 24-bit machine) all on, then

all

off,

at

a frequency you could adjust. The system

was entirely designed around

multiprogramming, so a non-operator running

such a job might produce distracting sounds

or just garbage, depending on what

else

was

in the machine running.

On

the

CDC

3300 (and other machines in

that series), the real purpose of the loud-

speaker was

as

an operator aid, and it was

very useful that way. The printer de-spooler

made the speaker chuckle a little, the reader

made

so.

much noise that the speaker didn't

matter, and most programs that we ran

fre-

quently made characteristic patterns of sounds.

And, of course, we did have programs

designed specifically to produce music.

CDC

used the feature

to

make the expansion and

shrinking of certain system tables very obvi-

ous

-when one table

was

changed in size,

the system would "whoop" up or down very

noticeably.

-from Edward Rice, via Internet

APPLE II

CIRCUIT

DESIGN

BOOK

AVAILABLE

IN

QUANTITY

• I

am

the author of

?he

Apple

II Circuit

Description,

Howard

Sams

& Co.,

1983,

which

has

been out of print for several years.

I..

..

would like to donate about

200

copies to

schools

or

computer clubs. Here

is

my

offer:

Available for the cost of surface UPS only:

new copies of the book (second printing); 1

carton minimum order, 28 copies to a carton.

The book

is

8.5xll

inch format, plastic comb

bound, with

194

pages

(172

standard-size pages

plus

22

fold-out pages .... which display schemat-

ics,

timing diagrams, etc. Cover price: $22.95 .

The book

is

a very complete, clock-edge-by-

clock-edge, circuit description of the Apple

II

Plus (and earlier) motherboard's CPU,

memory, video (text, lo-res, hi-res, color),

lIO,

etc. Great for anyone troubleshooting an

Apple

II

to the IC level,

or

who

wants to

understand the workings of the Apple

II

spe-

cifically or similar computers in general.

Sorry, it applies in general to the Apple / / e

(and later), but does not contain specific

Apple / / e schematics

or

description.

My

favorite part of the book (to research and

write about) was the way in which software

and TTL chips combine to create an

NTSC

signal for color graphics display on a standard

TV set.

-from Winston Gayler, via Internet

FOOTHILL

MUSEUM

IN

TRANSITION

• A

few

years

ago

I visited a wonderful little

museum-I

think it was called the Foothills

Electronics

Museum-on

the campus of a

small college above Silicon Valley. I recall a

modest but interesting collection, including

some things from Nolan Bushnell's

garage/attic! whatever.

Did this museum close? If

so,

what happened

to its collections?

-from Dr. Paul Ceruzzi, via Internet

January-March

1994

The

Analytical Engine Page

39

[We have heard from Dr. Seymour Stein,

treasurer of the Perham Foundation in Los

Altos, that the Foothill Electronics Museum

is

"in containers but very much alive -40,000

square feet

of

materials." Their old building

at

Foothill College was taken over for classroom

use, but they're negotiating for a 99-year

lease

(no fools they)

on

a new building in Kelly

Park in San Jose. These negotiations have

made it out

of

committee and the proposal

will be made to the

City

Council of San Jose

shortly.

So,

no, it didn't get scattered to the winds ...

MORE

ON

ELECTRONIC

MAIL

•

Hi

Kip, I have one suggestion about the

ENGINE. Have

you

considered including

email addresses in the attributions of articles?

I might like to correspond with some

of

the

authors

or

letter writers if

we

had acquain-

tances

or

interests in common.

-from

Tom

Van Vleck, via Internet

[I take

your

point, but nothing

is

simple on

the net -where "uninhibited communication"

is

as

loaded

with

contradiction

as

"paperless

office" -and this

is

actually a holy skirmish

of no mean order, kept alive by the dedicated

followers of fashion for

whom

an unlisted

net.address

is

as

cool

as,

say, an unlisted pager

number,

so

to speak. Read the letter and

reply "Attribution

of

Electronic Mail" in the

October

ENGINE,

but the kernel here

is,

we

print e-mail addresses only with pre-existing

permlsslon.

Now,

certainly we can print

yours

and per-

sonally I wish we could print

everybody's,

but

to say so would be flame-bait, which

we

avoid .... not only are we a Respectable Publica-

tion, but net.kickboxing takes time

we

don't

have, he said yawning .... ]

QUERIES

[Queries are sorted by subject, and within

that, by model if applicable.

If

the person querying has permitted

us

to

publish an e-mail address, we have done so,

and please reply directly to it; otherwise,

reply to cpu@chac.win.net

or

the

EI

Cerrito

address, and we will store and forward.

Necessary warning: Income from subs keeps

the

ENGINE

robust and lack

of

same, unfor-

tunately, makes it lose weight.

Currently

we

try

to publish queries that we receive from

anyplace in the world,

on

the premise that,

even if the subject and author aren't in Cali-

fornia, the answer well might be.

If

the

ENGINE

has

to

get thinner, we may be

compelled to require a California source

or

tie-in for published queries. Vote

against

this

dire possibility

by

subscribing today! EOPlug]

ALTOS:

NEEDS

A

HAND

WITH

A

BOOTLESS

XENIX

SYSTEM

• 1 have recently acquired an old Altos

486

computer running Microsoft

XENIX

3.1. The

set of install disks

is

incomplete so I need to

know how I can make a bootable system disk

and set of backups

so

I can restore the system

if something gets trashed. If anyone remem-

bers this particular XENIX implementation

and knows how to do this, please email me

with particulars. Thanks in advance.

Don Congdon, dcongdon@delphi.com

ATARI 2600: REALLY

GETIING

INTO

IT

• I would like to read the contents of a

Atari

VCS

cartridge by constructing some

type of interface that will read the contents

into my computer. I remember several years

ago

that one of the electronic project maga-

zines published a article describing

how

to

construct a device that would allow you to

save

cartridge contents to a tape.

If

anyone

Page

40

The

Analytical

Engine

January-March 1994

has

that

issue

or

has the pinouts

of

a

cartridge please send mail. Thanks in advance!

-from Patrick Fleming, wiZ@apple.com, via

Internet

ATARI

xOO:

STRANGE

ERROR

MESSAGE

..

On

the old Atari 400/800 computers

(c.

1980), if

you

had the BASIC cartridge plugged

in, it generated

error

messages like

"ERROR

12

AT

LINE

1320" . You then had to look up

the

error

number

in the manual to find out

exactly

what

the

error

was. The first entry in

the lookup table was

"ERROR

0:

Power not

on." Since it hardly seems possible that

you're

going

to

be seeing

any

error

messages at

all

if

the

power

isn't on, I've always wondered

whether

this was a joke

or

whether it could

conceivably have referred to something else,

like a peripheral device.

-from David P. Mikkelson, via Internet

BASIS 108:

QUERY

..

Does anyone

know

of

or

have experience

with

a Basis

lOS?

It is/was an Apple

IT

com-

patible

(6502?)

with

a

280

(CP/M)

as

a

second

CPU.

I

think

it was made in

Germany.

-from Peter F. Bastien, via Internet

BUGS

'N'

LOOPS

(GAME)

QUEST

..

c.

1973-1976,

my

co-workers and I used to

amuse ourselves at lunchtime with a game

that ran

on

our

IBM/360/370. The game was

called "Bugs

'n'

Loops," and it was based on

the concept

of

a

Turing

machine emulation.

When

your

turn

came, you had to code the

next instruction in the program; one which

would execute

without

forcing the pointer off

the end

of

the

tape

(a

"bug"),

or

one which

would force the instructions to reiterate in-

definitely

(a,

well,

you

know

...

).

You were

given something like

45

seconds to figure out

what

your

next instruction would be; and if

you overran

your

allotment,

you

lost however

many subsequent turns were necessary

to

make up the deficit. It remains one of the

most intellectually stimulating and challenging

games I have ever played

ana

computer.

Oh,

yeah, it was written in APL.

Does anyone else have recollection

of or

ex-

perience

with

this game? More

to

the point,

does anyone have a copy of the source that

can be made available, either in the original

APL (I'll refresh

mysel~

or, even better, in

some more contemporary, IBM-PC compatible

language?

Eagerly and gratefully awaiting

your

replies.

-from Steve Gross, via Internet

BURROUGHS

205:

THEN

WHAT

DID

THE

PENGUIN

USE?

..

Was the (Bat)Computer used

by

Batman &

Robin

on

the

TV

series ('60s) a real

Burroughs

Datatron

205

computer?

-from Marcelo Savio, via Internet

CANON

CX-l:

CALLED

"OBSCURE"

BY

NEW

OWNER·

..

I have been assaulted with a

CANON

CX-

1.

So

far I have

only

read one

of

the

manu-

als.

And I

wonder

if the OS called

MCX

is

related with

CP/M

or

is

it some

other

obscure beast.

Any

info

is

appreciated .

-from Lennart Sandberg, via Internet

CDC

CYBER

180:

POWER

RATING

WANTED

..

I once had to use a

CDC

Cyber

180

machine for a few months (180/640

or

some

such detail). It had a

UNIX

emulation

(VX/VE), and the oversize(?)

NOS/VE

native

operating system -SCL programming was

fun in a macabre sort

of

way because it was,

IMHO,

so disgustingly complex ....

January-March

1994

The Analytical Engine

Page

41

It

was

a regular monster, but I never did

learn very much about just what kind of

machine it was .... I don't really

miss

it,

except

for a certain nostalgia that any such beast

would surely bring about.

So

here are my questions: Would some one

out there know just how "powerful" these

machines were?

How

fast?

How

would they

compare with mainframes from their time

periods,

or

minis like the VAX series? And

how would they rank against the

32

bit

RISCs?

-from Shyamal Prasad, Department of Com-

puter Science, Southern Methodist University,

via Internet

CIMLINC: DEPENDS

ON

YOUR

DEFINITION

OF

"OLD

••••

"

..

I've come into possession of an old

Cimlinc PowerCim

68020

workstation. It has

a

19"

Hitachi color monitor,

8Mb

of RAM,

and an external chassis with

70Mb

disk and a

60Mb tape. It's built on

(gag)

a Multibus

chassis.

The problem,

as

usual,

is

that no one will

admit to having a manual for it. Cimlinc

is

still happily in business, but hasn't made

hardware in 6 years, and the guy I talked to

couldn't locate anything. Xerox, on the other

hand, wouldn't admit to knowing anything

about it at all.

A friend's dad

is

a regional muck with Xerox,

and rescued it from a warehouse

in

Atlanta

somewhere, but apparently, while I did get a

boot tape, there were no docs around for it

(so

I don't know how to

use

the boot tape).

I refuse to let a workstation with 24bit

graphics and a

19"

tube

go

to waste ... if I

can

get docs on the video card, I'll port

Xll

to it

(it

runs

4.3

BSD,

so

it shouldn't

be

that

hard .... ) Help??!!

-from Jay Ashworth,

via

Internet

CROMEMCO

S3:

EXPERIENCE

SOUGHT

..

I live in the Washington D.C. metropolitan

area (Charles County, Maryland to

be

exact),

and I am looking for someone with

Cromemco System Three experience and a

kind heart (that means I can't pay

:-))

to help

revive this part of computer history.

The

S3

has

two of the original Persci

8"

drives which

use

voice coils and I understand

were a bear to keep working. I would be

willing to reimburse

gas

cost and price of a

decent meal to someone

who

can help

me

fire it up. After turning the key, the drives

spin up

(yes,

with a boot disk in

A),

but I

never get anything on the screen. I plan to

keep it regardless,

so

buyers need not

approach

me

(both of you!

;-)).

Anyone who

can

help, please respond via private e-mail.

Thanks!

-from Allan Hamill, p00722@psilink.com

DATA GENERAL MP /20:

WHAT

ARE

YOU ASKING ME?

..

I recently added a Data General MP/20 to

my computer collection. The system has a

cartridge drive,

5.25"

floppy drive, and a

5.25"

form factor hard drive. Unfortunately, I know

very little (nothing might

be

more accurate)

about the machine, and the point in the boot

process at which I'm stumped isn't addressed

in

the docs I have. When I boot the system

and type "26h"

at

the bang prompt to

(attempt to) get it to boot from the hard

drive, it responds:

SPECIFY

EACH

DISK

IN

THE

LDU

DISK

UNIT

NAME?

I can't find this in the docs, and have no

idea

what to type. Typing anything here

gives

me

the following:

DON'T

UNDERSTAND '{whatever}'.

AVAILABLE TYPES ARE:

Page

42

The

Analytical Engine January-March

1994

DKB, DPD, DPE, DPF, DPG, DPH, DPI,

DPJ, DPK, DPL, DPM, and

DPN

DISK

UNIT

NAME?

I'm

also looking for a set of the customer

diagnostic floppies and an AOS boot set, if

anyone happens

to

have these and could loan

me

a set.

If

anyone from

DG

reads this, I'd

be

happy

to

buy

a set

(if

they're still avail-

able) -please send

me

a phone number to

call!

As

always, Thanks!

-from Bill von Hagen, via Internet

DATA

GENERAL

NOVA

DISK

CONTROLLER:

SPECS,

OR

MORE,

WANTED

•

As

part

of

the historic machines project

(to

create simulators for machines of historic

interest), I am looking for a specification,

users manual,

or

even

an

0/5

driver for the

NOVA

moving head disk controller

(mnemonic DKP under RDOS, device

033

or

073).

This controller handled a variety of

drives, including the Diablo

33

and

44,

the

Century

111

and 114, and

DG's

first floppy

disk drive.

(If

I could only find MIMIC (the mini simula-

tor system that ran on DEC-I0's), I'd have

sources not only for the

8,

11,

and Nova, but

DEC's whole

18b

line

as

well.)

Please reply bye-mail.... Thanks.

-from Bob Supnik,

supnik@human.enet.dec.com

DEC

SBC-ll:

SLIGHTLY

PUZZLING

• Stashed under my desk I have an SBC-ll,

which also seems to have been known

as

a

"Falcon" (whether by DEC

or

others, I'm not

sure). According

to

the manual, its single-chip

processor

is

called a micro-TIL

Apparently this chip contains a "configuration

register" which

is

loaded during power up and

controls various operating modes of the proc-

essor. The manual briefly mentions that

in

the SBC-ll the chip

is

set to operate in "user

mode" with "addressing restricted to

16

bits".

This suggests that the chip

is

capable of oper-

ating in other modes

or

with more address

bits, but the manual

gives

no explanation.

There only seem to

be

16

address lines

coming out of the chip.

Does anyone out there know more about this

chip and what it

is

capable

of?

Thanks for

any info,

-from Greg Ewing, via Internet

DECWAR

(GAME):

IN

SEARCH

OF

• I

am

looking for the source to a game,

which ran on a DEC-I0, called DECWAR. It

is

a multiplayer Trek-type game developed at

the University of Texas, in

FORTRAN.

If

you have played Megawar on CompuServe,

that

is

it, but rewritten with slightly more

functionality.

All my leads have turned up negative. I heard

that one of the implementors was in Minne-

sota, but I have not been able to reach him

[since]

he

is

not on [the] net .... Anyone with

any information, please contact

me

at

hsnewman@wixer.bga.com,

or

512-322-3841.

Thanks!

-from Harris Newman, via Internet

DYNASTY SmartALEC: BOY,

THAT

Z-80

SURE

GOT

AROUND

....

• I'm trying to locate former users of

an

old

Z-80A

PC, the Dynasty SmartALEC, that

was

manufactured

by

Dynasty Computer Corp. m

Dallas, TX, during the '80s. Thanks.

-from "TORAIDHE@DELPHLCOM"

January-March

1994

The

Analytical Engine Page

43

GNAT:

ALL WE

GOT

..

I've heard

of

a

GNAT.

The floppy format

is

compatible with some other systems of the

same era (Intertec Superbrain comes to mind)

but the boot disks are not the same. I don't

have any disks for it, unfortunately.

-from

Terry

Kennedy, via Internet

[Further note: We are trying to track down

Thomas Lafleur, a co-founder of the

GNAT

Corporation, in hopes that he might have

some tech ref. -Editors ]

HP

9000/3xx:

NICE

SAVE

AT

THE

LAST

MINUTE

..

A co-worker has come to

me

looking for

advice on the identity and usefulness

of

an

HP

9000

300

system which a friend of his

caught before it hit the dumpster

at

the local

nuclear plant. It

is

apparently a series

300

with a

68010

processor and 2.5MB of

memory. (1mb

on

the system board, 1mb on

an expansion board, and .5mb on another

expansion.)

It

is

also equipped with a

HP98546A Display Compatibility Interface and

a 35731A monitor, a keyboard, and a 9122D

dual floppy drive.

On

the keyboard

is

a

BASIC template. There

is,

unfortunately, no

hard disk, software,

or

manuals.

1)

What

is

it?

I assume it predates a

330

which

is

the oldest 9000 I had seen.

2)

What does/did it run? Will this thing run

some version

of

HP-UX?

3)

What more would be needed should one

be inclined to

turn

it into a system? Software

obviously, but any additional hardware?

-from

John

Ruschmeyer, via Internet

HP

9810:

HELP

AND

DOCS

WANTED

..

I have an

HP

9810A calculator

(1971

vintage, about the size

of

a large VCR .... )

which almost works, but not quite. I get the

display to light up and

it

sort-of responds

to

keypresses, but every numeral you type pro-

duces a '0' digit on the display. Typing 3

digits for example produces '000'

on

the

display. Does anyone know anything about

this beast? Does anyone have

any

schematics

for

it?

Anyone

know

any tricky things about

it (assuming I get it to

work

again)? The

pinout

of

the peripheral bus (it has 3 periph-

eral slots,

as

well

as

3 cartridge slots)? It came

with 3 cartridges : Mathematics, Peripheral

IT,

and Printer Alpha. Anyone, have any manuals

that I might be able to copy? Anyone even

heard of

it?

Thanks in advance ....

-from Brian Murray, via Internet

HOME

COMPUTERS:

HOW

HEAVY

WAS IT?

..

For

reasons better left unexplained, I'd like

to hear about the heaviest PCs

or

peripherals

that you have run across (or been run across

by?).

I'm

looking for things that could con-

ceivably have

wound

up in someone's home

which

is

the only reason for the

PC

qualifier

("

Aye, lad. I worked

on

the Univac Model 0

with the Strategic

Air

Command.

Thirty

tons

of lead shielding she had, and ran

on

dilith-

ium crystals ... ").

lilt

was so heavy that..."

would be great. Come to think

of

it, "It ran

so

hot that ... " would be fun too.

-from Eric Valentine, via Internet

Page

44

The

Analytical

Engine

January-March

1994

IBM

029:

I'M

SURE

WE

ALL

REMEMBER

•••.

..

I have just acquired an

029

Keypunch in

working

condition

to

use in

my

History

of

Computing

course in January; does anyone

know

~f

sources

of

other

EAM

equipment

(such

as

a sorter)?

Tim

Bergin

Department

of

Computer

Science and

Information Systems

The

American University

4400 Massachusetts Ave,

NW

Washington,

DC

20016-S116

202

S85-3863

IBM

610

"AUTOPOINT":

FOLKLORE

OR

DOCS

WANTED

..

Can

anyone tell us about the IBM

610?

I

remember wiring

the

602

and 603, but this

does

not

ring a bell.

(I

saw it discussed in

Computing

Review 9008-0469).

Anyone

have

anything

written

on

the

610?

-from Laurence

1.

Press, via Internet

IBM

709, 7090, 7094:

DINOSAUR

HUNTING

..

Are there

any

restored/living 709X boxes

on

Earth, and, if not, could one be built?

-from M. Edward Borasky, via Internet

..

I have a

7094-1

and

a 709,

both

complete

with

peripherals, spares, documentation and

software and in

pretty

good shape.

Neither

has been powered

up

since I deinstalled them

about 7 years ago.

There

is

a

rumor

of

an intact

704

in a closet

at Argonne.

IBM has at least one

of

almost every machine

they

ever made in a warehouse' somewhere in

New

York

state.

My

understanding

is

that

they are

not

in general complete and prob-

ably could

not

be brought up.

Does anyone

know

if BMEWS

and/or

the

DEW

line

is

still up and still

run

by

7090's?

Any

more out there?

-from Paul Pierce, via

Internet

IBM

PROGRAMMER

APTITUDE

TEST:

DREAM

OR

NIGHTMARE?

..

Reading an old

(1971)

journal article, I saw

a reference

to

the IBM

Programmer

Aptitude

T est.

The

reference in the article was:

McNamara, W. J., & Hughes, J. L.

Manual for the revised programmer aptitude

test.

White Plains,

New

York: IBM, 1969.

From

the (brieQ description in the article, the

test apparently has 3 parts: completion

of

number

sequences, geometric paired compari-

sons, and

word

problems similar to those in

junior

high school mathematics.

My

questions are:

Has

anyone

out

there actu-

ally taken this test?

How

would

I go about

getting a copy?

Thanks

in advance.

-from Paul Palmer,

Department

of

Mathe-

matics,

Oregon

State University, via Internet

INTEL

8008:

HLL's

WANTED

..

There were high level languages for this

ingenious construction: PL/M-OS, and

SCELBAL, a very BASIC-like language.

I'm

looking for these

two

languages for

my

homebrew 8008-system.

Is

there

anybody

out

there,

who

has one of these languages?

You can write a cross-assembler,

which

trans-

lates a

800S

assembler source

to

SOx86-code,

so that

you

can

run

your

old programs in

the year 2007

on

an Intel

Nonium.

I did this

for the 80486.

-from Klemens Krause, University

of

Stuttgart, via Internet

[Editor's note: !!!!!]

January-March

1994

The

Analytical Engine Page

45

INTEL

MDS:

INFORMATION

NEEDED

..

1'm working

on

a project on the history of

microcomputer development systems, and need

information on Intel development systems for

8086,

80186,

and

80286

systems. In particular,

I am interested in locating any Intel MDS

systems

or

MDS system documentation for

these chips

or

even just information about

them. I believe that the systems I

am

inter-

ested in are follow-on products to the Intellec

8/80 system.

Note: I am not looking for information about

the chips themselves.

-from Jeremy Brest, via Internet

LEE

DATA

MINI:

HELP

WANTED

WITH

BAD

DISK

..

I own a LeeData System

2000

mini com-

puter [with] a problem. I think

it

has a bad

sector on the

HD.

Every time it boots it asks

me if it should repair the filesystem because it

wasn't shut down properly. Then it starts

repairing but .... gives "READ ERROR

SECTOR

xx"

(I

can't remember the number)

Also some important parts

of

the system have

disappeared : the lusr directory

is

empty,

mkdir isn't there and

so

on

..

Can someone

help me with this ? Most important I think

is

to mark the bad sector but how can I do

it?

System

specs:

it has a 80Mb

HD,

5,25" DD,

+

1-

12

serial ports, parallel port, Tape-

streamer. It

is

running a XENIX version and

the machine

is

dated about Sept '85. I can get

an old backup but I haven't got

ANY

manuals.

-from Wim van der Brink, via Internet

MOTOROLA

VME/10:

ANY

ADVICE?

..

Anyone out there familiar with the

Motorola

VME/10

computers? I just managed

to acquire a working one not

too

long

ago.

It

runs something called

VERSADos-a

very

strange operating system indeed .... Commentsl

advice welcome.

-from Kevin Fisher, via Internet

NIXDORF

PC-OS:

DOCS

NEEDED

..

I recently picked up a Nixdorf

PC-OS,

a

hand-held computer with a rubber-key

keyboard and a graphics

LCD

screen that

is

capable of displaying 8 lines

of

text. It

features an 80C88,

128KB

RAM and,

according to the startup message, it

is

programmed in

FORTH.

Since it does not

have any mass-storage, files are kept in RAM

and programs are added

by

inserting EPROMs

into slots in the bottom of the case. You can

fold the display

onto

the keyboard

Gust

like a

notebook). The

only

modules that were in-

cluded in my

PC-OS

were for a demo to

cal-

culate some insurance

fee.

I would like to

write some software but, alas, I do not have

any documentation! Although this thing was

marketed by my company, there seems to

be

nobody (who reads news)

who

does remember

the

PC-OS.

Furthermore I

think

that we only

re-painted the

case

(grey was the "color" to

go)

of another company's product.

Does anyone remember such a beast?

Any

documentation I might be able to

get?

Any

hints would be appreciated.

-from Josef Moellers, via Internet

PHILIPS

P8xx: MATERIAL

WANTED

..

Looking through the latest

ENGINE

.... I

was

reminded

of

an omission in almost

all

lists of computers, that of Philips.

In the early 70's, Philips made a series of

computers -the P800 series.

The

P8S0 was a

Page

46

The Analytical Engine January-March

1994

small,

16

bit (to the programmer - 8 bit in

hardware) machine with 1 or

2K

words of

core (there were 2 cabinet

sizes,

3U

or

6U

rack),

I/O

slots, and a processor built from

MSI TTL. All ran off a large linear power

supply at the back. The instruction set

was

weird, sort of RISC-like (although most in-

structions needed several processor cycles to

complete), and was something like 5-bit

op-

code, 4 bit register, 2 bit addressing mode, 4

bit register, I-bit load/store

flag

or

5-bit op-

code, 3-bit register, 8 bit operand.

The registers were split into 2 banks of

8,

called

AO-A7

and

BO-B7,

and the second

format

of

instruction could only

use

the A

registers. Register

AO

was

the program counter

I think.

I/O

instructions could set processor

flags

directly depending

on

the

I/O

result,

so

it was quite common to have

an

OT

(out)

instruction followed by a

RB

(relative

backwards) branch

to

keep on trying until the

I/O

succeeded. The Most significant bit of the

word was called bit

O.

The P855 was a larger machine, with up to

32K

words

of

core and .... extra instructions.

For

example, the P850 could only

do

I-bit

shifts, but the P855 could do multi-bit shifts

in 1 instruction. The operand field

of

the

instruction was always 1 on a

P850,

but could

be

set to other values on the

P855

I think.

The

P851

was basically

an

LSI-chipped

(2

custom chips, PLANET and SPALU. SPALU

was

a 4-bit cascadable data-path chip,

PLANET was the control sequencer/ROM)

P850 with some of the

P855

upgrades. The

system was now built on 6U Eurocards, and

the memory was semiconductor RAM. There

was a battery-backup option for this. There

were also P852, P857 and possibly some

others, but I have no documentation on these.

Does anyone

else

remember these machines,

and have any nice tricks for them?

-from

Tony

Duell, University of Bristol

(UK), via Internet

PIED PIPER: NEEDS

TO

KNOW

WHERE

IT'S AT

• I have a Pied Piper Z80-based computer.

Does anyone know anything about it,

or

have

a bootable disk for

it?

.

-from Magnus

Y.

Alvestad via Internet

RADIO

SHACK

TRS-80: ANALYSIS PAD?

• I

am

looking for any old TRS-80 people

that recall a product called 'Analysis Pad'. I

need to know when it was released, and who

wrote it, and what company produced it.

-from Taylor Hutt, via Internet

RICE UNIVERSITY

COMPUTER:

WANTED, USERS

OF

• I'm looking for former users of the Rice

Institute Computer, also known

as

the Rice

Univ~rsity

Computer, or, more simply, the

Rl..

..

If

there are any

Rl

hackers out there

reading this, please drop

me

a line. I'd like to

interview you for the project I'm doing. Also,

does

anyone know what happened to J.K.

Iliffe after about

1972?

-from Adam Justin Thornton,

adam@rice.edu

or

+ 1

713

630-8884,

via

Internet

SAGE: MULTI-MEDIA

PROJECT

•

Is

anyone out there sitting on any informa-

tion, pictures,

or

film

of

the old Air Force

SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment)

system?

It ran from around

1957

to

1984

and

handled the air defense for

all

of

North

America. I

am

doing a multi-media project on

it.

I called

NORAD

and even they are

looking for stuff

on

the system.

Any

help

would

be

great, even folklore. Thanks.

-from Alan Spurgeon, CTIS Project, via

Internet

January-March

1994

The Analytical Engine

Page

47

STRIDE 460:

IN

NEED

OF

ATTENTION

..

Recently,

at

an auction ... .! picked

up

a

Stride

460

(10MHz

68K,

1M

memory,

80M

disk (having recently been a

DEC

person I

took one look and screamed 'RD53! Argh!'

but that's another story ...

))

Anyway, the

machine currently has

BOS

installed .... For

very obvious reasons, I don't want this.

So,

are there any alternatives? A UNIX-

derivative would

be

a bit much to

ask

I

think, given the hardware. I'm pretty sure

that the UCSD p-system

was

available on

these machines

(I

have space for

4M

if 1

is

not enough) and my preference

is

to get the

system running rather than cannibalise it... I

have both cartridge tape and floppy drive, and

I can probably master a tape on another

system if you

give

me

enough details.

Also, any documentation on the machine -

operating manuals, hardware manuals etc

would

be

great. I have no problems paying

postage,

or

making you a reasonable .... offer

for the stuff .... Thanks for any help/ideas.

-from Michael Smith, via Internet

TANDY

6000HD:

DOCS

WANTED

..

I've recently been given a dead Tandy

6000HD XENIX computer with

all

the

XENIX reference manuals and system disks,

but without a hardware reference manual.

These manuals are the 'puffy' woodgrain-

looking books circa

TRS-80

Model

IV.

Around this time, Tandy

was

putting out

pretty useful hardware reference guides,

so

I

assume one

is

available for this 6000HD.

Does anyone have one that they'd

be

willing

to sell/giveltrade to

me?

I'd really like to get

this computer working. Currently it displays

just a raster scan, and doesn't spin either the

8"

floppy

or

the 15mb

HD,

so I'm assuming

it's gonna take a lot of work to resurrect

again

...

Thanks bunches for any assistance.

-from Xyanthilous Harrierstick, Student

Computing Facility,

New

Mexico State

University

at

Las

Cruces, via Internet

TEKTRONIX 8550: DETAILS WANTED

..

Does anyone know anything about the

Tektronix

8550

microprocessor development

system? One was being thrown out here ....

so

I

rescued it, and would like to know a bit

more about it.

So

far, I've found out that it

consists of 2 modules, the

8501

Data Man-

agement Unit, and the

8301

(Can't remember,

but emulator would be a good name for it).

The

8501

contains a

DEC

LSI11/2

CPU

card,

a floppy controller (Z80-based), some RAM,

and a couple

of

I/O

cards. That box looks

complete and untouched. The

8301

contains a

system controller based round the 2650A,

some more RAM, a 'language processor'

(A

Z80 I think), the RTPA

(A

logic analyser/bus

grabber), and slots for a PROM programmer,

and emulation processors. Unfonunately I

don't have any emulation processor cards, and

am

wondering if they have been removed,

or

whether the above configuration would

be

useful without them.

I have user manuals for some of it, but no

service data.

-from

Tony

Duell, University of Bristol

(UK),

via Internet

Page

48

The Analytical Engine January-March

1994

UNIVAC

M642B:

HISTORICAL

BACKGROUND

SOUGHT

• Does anyone have any information or

his-

torical background on the UNIVAC

M642B?

It was used

as

a communications processor

until recently in the NASA ground network

(satellite tracking stations). The computer

uses

discrete transistor logic and core memory. I

think it also had a small amount of plated

wire memory. The

I/O

devices were a bank

of 7-track mechanical tape handlers that were

later upgraded to pneumatic operation. Two

CPU/memory

units were connected to an

EMU

(expanded memory unit?) in a typical

configuration. It used 6 bit field code instead

of ASCII

or

EBCDIC. I was told that

it

had

been used

as

a U.S. Navy fire control com-

puter in a previous incarnation. It had a

"Battle Short" switch on the front panel and

a really loud fault horn that

was

turned on

whenever the system crashed. The instruction

set and architecture were really weird. Soft-

ware was developed in a language called

SYCOL.

The SCE (Spacecraft Command Encoder),

another old NASA system, used the Honey-

well

316

.... There are still a

few

of these that

are in use. Wasn't this computer

used

as

a

node in the original ARPANet?

-from

John

A. Limpert, via Internet

VOLKER-CRAIG:

FOLKLORE

WANTED

•

How

many of you remember using Volker-

Craig terminals

at

some point in your hackish

careers? Did you love 'em, hate 'em, tolerate

'em; were they good for their

day?

And

whatever became

of

the company that makes

'em? I know little more than that,

at

one

point, Volker-Craig

*was*

a small outfit cre-

ated by two guys named Volker and Craig, in

a rented office near the University of

Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.

~ from "Royal Nuisance," via Internet

WHITECHAPEL

WORKSTATIONS:

FORGOTIEN

BUT

NOT

GONE

• At home I run a couple of Whitechapel

Workstations (WCW) MG-1s.

They

are

NS32016-based graphics boxes running 4.2BSD.

Until recently, I thought that the MG-1 (and

its colour version, the CG-1) were the only

models that WCW ever made -they went

bust in

1988,

just like

80%

of

all

1980s

work-

station startups. However, I was recently told

that they also made a couple of other

machines: the MG-2

(also

NSC32k

based?)

and

the HITECH-10

(MIPS

R2000

based?)

which

seemingly ran UMIPS.

Can anyone give

me

*any* information on

either of these machines? Has anyone ever

seen either of them?

Is

anyone still using

either of them? Does anyone know where I

can lay my hands on an example of either?

Thanks.

-from lain A. F. Fleming, via Internet

ZILOG

TAPE

DRIVE:

GETIING

IT

ROLLING

AGAIN

• I acquired a 1980-ish Zilog ZEUS

2000

system 80.... Everything worked fine until I

attempted a backup using the tape drive,

whereupon the rubber bit that turns the gear

thing on the cartridge tape

fell

apart; old

age,

I

guess,

and

less

than ideal storage conditions.

I took the tape drive out and attempted to

make a replacement rubber part. Unfortu-

nately I don't know

how

big the roller was

to start with.

So,

a few questions:

1)

On

the tape

is

a bundle of numbers and

names. Can someone tell

me

if the company

that made the drive

is

still going and would

be

willing/able to show

me

how to

fix

the

thing? (The roller appeared to be an integral

part of the motor shaft, although I could

be

mistaken, but it seems. silly to have to replace

the whole motor just to

fix

the rubber roller

on

it.)

January-March

1994

The Analytical Engine

Page

49

On

the motor:

DATA ELECTRONICS

INC

301386

24VDC

8133

12207

On

the ribbon cable connecting the drive

to

its controller board:

59-0117-00

REV-A

On

a plate on the chassis:

DATA ELECTRONICS INC,

sn

34-12813

pn

301091

rev S

mn 3447-44ABDEF-S2

Somewhere (I didn't note down where

exactly-probably the read/record

head):

American Magnetics Corporation

Carson, California

serial no

4241

part no

301178

2)

Would somebody that knows about tape

drives please

give

an outline of how they

operate? Would I assume that the motor

is

driven at some well defined speed and that if

the roller

is

the wrong diameter,

or

is

"too"

eccentric, that the data written will

be

useless?

Is

there some kind

of

read after write check?

I only noticed the one head and not that

many connections,

so

this

seems

unlikely.

Basically, if I want to get the drive functional

again, what are the important things to

get

right about a replacement roller? I attempted

to turn one out of a rubber washer, but the

lathe didn't like it, and I can't

file

very

accu-

rately.... Bear in mind that this

is

just for fun

and I that I'm a

poor

research student (whose

subject

has

nothing to do with fixing up old

computers, and whose

colleague~

in the

de-

partment think the only

use

for the machine

would

be

to replace the heating.)

thanks,

-from Jonathan

H.

N. Chin, via Internet

NEXT ISSUE

Interviews. Macintosh, the Computer for Lots

of Us. Turing's Contradiction. Letters.

Queries. And more and more and more ....

PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED

Hewlett-Packard

Journal,

Volume

35

Number

8,

August

1984

(photocopy). Complete details of

the

HP

150

Touchscreen Personal Computer

[see

ACQUISITIONS]. From Karen Lewis.

Historically

Brewed,

newsletter of the Historical

Computer Society.

Issue

H1,

Aug/Sept

1993.

History

of

the GUI;

Influence of

Star

Trek

on personal computers;

A look

at

P ARC; Altair and Cromemco;

Review of

Stan

Veit's

History.

12 pp.

Issue

H2,

Oct/Nov

1993.

Apple Lisa;

VIC-20;

COLOSSUS; War stories; Coleco ADAM;

Review of Steven Levy's

Hackers.

16

pp.

Issue

H3,

Dec 1993/Jan

1994.

Apple II's

beginnings; Art of Computer Collecting;

Computer Generation; Review

of

Dr. Thomas

F. Haddock's

Collector's

Guide

to

Personal

Computers

and

Pocket

Calculators.

16

pp.

US$15.00

per

-year.

From David Greelish.

Miracles

in

Trust,

newsletter

of

the Perham

Foundation. Volume 5 Number

1,

first

quarter

1993.

The first Silicon Valley garage;

Background of the Perham Foundation; Chro-

nology of West Coast Wireless, part

2.

8 pp.;

available for

USS20.00

annual membership.

From Dr. Seymour Stein.

The

Computer

Museum

News,

Computer

Museum, Boston. Autumn

1993.

Global

Networking Exhibit;

1994

Computer Bowl;

Interactive exhibits; Events calendar. 8 pp.;

available with USS25.00-50.00 annual member-

ship. Also:

The

Computer

Museum

Annual

Report

1993.

Summary of the Computer

Clubhouse and other outreach and educational

work. From Brian Wallace.

Page

50

The Analytical Engine January-March

1994

"University Courses," Martin Campbell-Kelly,

Department

of

Computer Science, University

of Warwick, presented at the ACM/SIGPLAN

Forum

on the History of Computing, April

20,

1993.

Discussion and guidelines for

teaching the history of computing

at

the

university level.

From

the author.

The

Z·Letter, newsletter of the

CP/M

and

Z-

System community.

Number

27,

September/October

1993.

Xerox

micros; Script programming; Radio Shack

Model

100;

correspondence and technical

discussion.

20

pp.

Number

28,

November/December

1993.

ReformaTTer

8"

diskette system; Bondwell

luggables; correspondence and technical

discussion.

20

pp.

US$18 for

12

issues

(2

years) From David

A.

J. McGlone.

ADDRESSES OF

CORRESPONDING

ORGANIZATIONS

The Computer Museum,

300

Congress Street,

Boston MA 02210. Brian C. Wallace, curator

of historical computing.

Historical Computer Society,

10928

Ted

Williams Place, El Paso

TX

79934.

Compu$erve 100116,217. David A. Greelish,

director and editor.

The Perham Foundation,

101

First Street

#394,

Los Altos

CA

94022. Donald F.

Koijane, president; Mike Adams, editor-in-

chief.

The

Z·Letter, Lambda Software Publishing,

149

West Hilliard Lane, Eugene

OR

97404. David

A.

J.

McGlone, editor and publisher.

THANKS TO ....

Al Kossow for the Mac XL.

Allen Baum for

FTP

space.

Hal Layer for the great

tour

of

his collection!

Ilya Galitzen-Weiss for wizardly Apple

hacking.

JAN

Lee for the list

of

701

sites.

Karen Lewis for the

HP

Journal photocopy.

Kevin Frank for proofing.

Lar Press for

FTP

space.

Larry Tesler, Robert Praetorius and

Tom

Ellis

for donations.

Lauren Weinstein for

FTP

space and gopher

access.

Nancy

Mulvany for that quick

(?)

drive to

the

Outer

Sunset ....

Rayanne Waggoner and Win Gayler for

agreeing that

CHAC

needed an Apple One.

SUBSCRIBE!

Okay, we blew it in October. We put the

sub coupon on the back

of

the last page and

didn't realize that

our

subscribers, being con-

servative in a highly literal sense,

wouldn't

want to cut up their copies. Guess how many

of those we didn't get back?

New

subscribers

just sent in personalized checks

or

addresses

on

scraps

of

paper.

However, the information we ask for on the

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is

information we need to service

your

sub properly. Therefore we'll make you

a promise. Until further notice (which trans-

lates

to

"until the

ENGINE

changes format,")

the coupon of the on-line edition will

be

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of

the

issue. The coupon

of

the paper edition will

be part of the stiff top sheet, which you're

supposed to remove and recycle anyway.

Either way, you can

use

the coupon and

your

ENGINE

will remain inviolate.

January-March 1994

The

Analytical Engine

Page

51

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NINES-CARD

This

agony

column

comes

to

us

from

USENETter

Lance

R.

Buckley:

When I worked for ADPNS, we had a major

power outage (our substation blew up). I was

the bozo in charge of the machine room at

the time

(4

triple-CPU DECsystem-10's,

untold PDP-8's and 11's, and a heap of

washing-machine disk drives and a zillion

other things scattered throughout the

building). The power-out happened at the

very end

of

my

12

hour night shift. The next

shift in had no one

who

could bring it

all

up

again.

So

...

.1

had to wait for the power to

come back. When it did, I spent the next 8

hours booting machines (from paper tape and

front-panel switches mostly) and getting

pe-

ripherals back online. By the time all the

machines were running reliably, it was time

for my shift to start again.

I·

spent most of

that time repairing the damage done to the

various filesystems

by

the crash, and re-estab-

lishing recalcitrant network links.

Page

52

The Analytical Engine January-March

1994

No

sleep.

No

breaks. Very little food.

No

drugs apart from gallons of

coffee.

I

was

starting to

see

little black furry things

in

my

peripheral vision, and odd people were whis-

pering in my ear.

By

the time I got home,

I'd been awake for over

44

hours, and

working hard for a solid

36

of those. And I

couldn't

get

to sleep. You've got to laugh,

ain't

ya?

CONTENTS

Editorial: CAMPAIGN

1994

.............................. 1

PROCLAIM

THE

DAy

.................................... 2

IN

MEMORIAM: TOM WATSON ................. 2

THE

mM

701

in

CALIFORNIA ...................... 4

ORIGINS AND LEGACY of the

mM

701

.... 4

DAWN

OF

THE

MICRO: Intel's Intellecs ....

10

RSN: DSP

ON

A 2-80 .....................................

14

LAND

OF

THE

SILENT GIANTS:

A Day

at

Livermore ..........................................

15

LONG

LIVE the APPLE

IT

.............................

19

A DECADE

OF

MACS ...................................

21

SPOTTER ALERT ............................................

21

SPOTTER FLASH .............................................

21

THINKING

OF

WRITING? ............................

21

DESPERA TE PLEA FOR MONEY ................

22

AND SPEAKING

OF

MONEy

......................

23

LIGHT A

MATCH

...........................................

23

OVERVIEW

OF

BUREAUCRATIC

PROCESSES ........................................................

23

ABOUT

YOUR

OLD, DUSTY LAPTOP ....

24

Book Review: STAN VEIT'S HISTORY OF

THE

PERSONAL COMPUTER .....................

24

ACQUISITIONS ................................................

26

LETTERS ...................................... : .....................

29

QUERIES ............................................................

39

NEXT

ISSUE

.......................................... : ...........

49

PUBLICA TIONS RECEIVED .........................

.49

ADDRESSES

OF CORRESPONDING

ORGANI2A TIONS ..........................................

50

THANKS

TO

....................................................

50

SUBSCRIBE!

.......................................................

50

GUIDELINES

FOR

DISTRIBUTION ............

51

GUIDELINES

FOR

SUBMISSION .................

51

NINES-CARD ....................................................

51

The ANALYTICAL ENGINE

Volume

1,

Number

3, January

1994

ISSN

1071-6351

newsletter of the Computer History Associa-

tion of California,

is

published four times a

year -in January, April, July and October

-

at

El

Cerrito, California.

Subscriptions are available with Association

membership

at

$25

per year individual,

$75

per year corporate or institutional,

or

$15

per

year low-income, student or senior. Use the

coupon to subscribe, or contact the Associa-

tIon

at:

1001

Elm Court,

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Cerrito, CA

94530-2602

FAX:

-510

528-5138

Internet: cpu@chac. win.net

r Kip Crosby, Managing

Editor

Jude Thilman, Telecomm Editor