ae
The ANALYTICAL ENGINE
Newsletter of the Computer History Association of California
ISSN 1071-6351
Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994
Kip Crosby, Managing Editor
Jude Thilman, Telecommunications Editor
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CONTENTS
EDITORIAL: THE X-PROJECT ................................. 2
IN IT FOR YOU, Part Two .................................. 3
NEW ADDRESSES ............................................ 3
"THE SAME TECHNOLOGY STILL HOLDS:"
Johnson and Harker, Part Two ............................. 4
BLETCHLEY PARK MOVES FORWARD, by Chris P. Burton ........ 16
SEX ON CAMPUS, 1969;
California's First ARPANet Host, by Doug Landauer ....... 21
IC CORNER:
Early IC ALU's in the Xerox Alto, by Tom del Rosso ...... 23
MORE ON PLASTIC ROT ..................................... 24
ASSURANCE FROM AMERICA ONLINE ........................... 25
NEW SUN HARDWARE REFERENCE .............................. 25
NOMADNESS NOTES AVAILABLE ............................... 26
SPOTTER ALERT ........................................... 27
SPOTTER FLASH ........................................... 27
DESPERATE PLEA FOR MONEY ................................ 28
AND SPEAKING OF MONEY.... ............................... 28
YOU PUBLISH! OR WE PERISH! .............................. 29
OVERVIEW OF BUREAUCRATIC PROCESSES ...................... 29
BOOK REVIEW:
COMPUTERS IN SPACE: Journeys with NASA, by Jim Tomayko .. 30
ACQUISITIONS ............................................ 32
LETTERS ................................................. 32
QUERIES ................................................. 42
ARTICLES NOTED .......................................... 52
PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED ................................... 53
ADDRESSES OF CORRESPONDING ORGANIZATIONS ................ 54
THANKS TO.... ........................................... 54
NEXT ISSUE .............................................. 55
GUIDELINES FOR DISTRIBUTION ............................. 55
GUIDELINES FOR SUBMISSION ............................... 56
ETERNAL VIGILANCE.... ................................... 56
A BALLOT by Tim Patterson ............................... 57
NINES-CARD by James H. Putnam ........................... 57
ADD MONEY, MAIL.... ..................................... 59
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 2
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Editorial: THE X-PROJECT
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My drawing was not a picture of a hat. It was a picture of a
boa constrictor digesting an elephant. But since the grown-ups
were not able to understand it, I made another drawing: I drew
the inside of the boa constrictor, so that the grown-ups could
see it clearly.
-- Saint-Exup‚ry, _The Little Prince_
In eighteen months we've learned a lot about pushing the
envelope. First the micros began to arrive, and, well, micros
are easy. (Up to a point!) Then we retrieved the PDS 1020 and
the HP 3000 on the very same day, and with some stretching (oof,
grunt) we had space for the minis too.
Okay. Playtime is over. Are we ready for a mainframe?
A major Federal agency in the Rockies would like to clear out a
bootable and working XDS 930. This once-potent mainframe from
Xerox Data Systems (which began life as Max Palevsky's
Scientific Data Systems) was built in Southern California in the
early Seventies. Certainly there are many classic California
mainframes, but this one indisputably has a lot of soul. And
while it's not small, it's not gargantuan, either. Just the size
to make rookie CS students stand there with their mouths open.
If we can find a place to put it.
Because what we mean by "not gargantuan" is....ten or twelve
racks. Say fifteen feet long, five tall and four deep. About the
size of a small five-passenger sedan, on its side.
It could be the kingpin of a real, museum-quality computer
collection. If we can find a place to put it.
We could even have it running, for special occasions.
Receptions. Conferences. Anniversaries. Fundraisers. If we can
find a place to put it.
When visiting scholars ask to see our California hardware we
could say "Right this way." If we can find a place to put it.
Look, friends. We conquer space or it conquers us. When CHAC
started eighteen months ago, it needed money, organization,
contacts, and credibility. Now it needs money, organization,
contacts, credibility, and space -- mostly space.
The opportunity to secure this XDS 930 is not without limit; nor
is the patience of its current owners. If we can't find a place
to put this within a reasonable time -- probably defined as a
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 3
couple of months -- this agency will write us off as Not Serious,
and scrap the computer.
_You_ can help us save this California classic by pointing the
way to donated storage for a computer about the size of a small
car. The space has to be long-term, because we don't want to
move this again for trivial reasons. A Silicon Valley location
would be nice, but anywhere in Northern California will do. Your
company's tax deduction will be signed, sealed and delivered.
And, naturally, undying gratitude and recognition is part of the
package.
1999 is here! Please help!
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IN IT FOR YOU, Part Two
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To our enthusiastically received offer of a discount on Doctor
Haddock's _Collector's Guide to Personal Computers_, we now add
a second spiff -- this one exclusively for subscribers.
Lexikon Services' HISTORY OF COMPUTING by Mark Greenia will be
the ENGINE's reward to you for a two-year subscription or
renewal. Compared to version 2.0, which was glowingly reviewed
in July's ENGINE, the extensively reworked Version 2.5 offers:
- Expanded and improved menus
- Over 60 pages of new information
- Expanded listing of early large digital computers
- Expanded listing of early microcomputers
- Over 300 different types of computers and devices
- Additional profiles of computer pioneers and companies
- Expanded bibliography
- Numerous revisions and clarifications in the Dictionary.
This indispensable reference to computer history, a US$19.95
value, can be _yours_ when you subscribe to the ANALYTICAL
ENGINE for two years, or extend your current subscription. Just
include the words "History Diskette" on your sub slip or in your
e-mail and we'll send it by first class post.
(Oh, and -- the HISTORY requires a computer with a 3.5" floppy
drive that runs MS-DOS or MS-Windows.)
-------------------------------------------------
NEW ADDRESSES
-------------------------------------------------
We're firmly established in Palo Alto and eager to receive
whatever you might want to send. (Note: Please _don't_ ship a
computer or other heavy hardware without querying first, by e-
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 4
mail or snail-mail.)
Subs, articles, donations and general correspondence are welcome
at:
Computer History Association of California
3375 Alma Street
Apt. 263
Palo Alto, CA 94306-3518
We were hoping to have a new e-mail address by the time this
issue of the ENGINE appeared, but InterNIC is drowning in
requests for domain names and couldn't get back to us by October
15th. Look for the updated address on the net and in the January
ENGINE.
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"THE SAME TECHNOLOGY STILL HOLDS:"
Rey Johnson and Jack Harker talk about RAMAC, the Low Cost File
System and the dawn of the floppy
(Part 2)
-------------------------------------------------
Interview by Kip Crosby and Max Elbaum
_KC: This does lead into something else that we should consider
before we get too far along in the hardware technology. There
always was the question of how you defined the data on the disk
-- once you put it on there, and can we briefly treat questions
of encoding and data location before we go further?_
RJ: Packing random numbers efficiently and getting to them.
Punch cards all stack one on top of the other, and the space
required is determined by the number of numbers you have. But
here, if the numbers are a thousand units apart, stacking them
becomes the problem. I'm not enough of a systems engineer to
answer that, but at the time we had Pete Luhn, a very prolific
inventor in IBM, who was responsible for the mathematical system
where, by doing arithmetic on an account number, you generated
random numbers, so all account numbers took on the
characteristic of random numbering and could then be sorted and
stacked very efficiently. And then when you got back, you'd re-
convert that random number by the encoding technique to the
original account number.
_KC: Did this amount to on-the-fly data compression?_
JH: No. That was to randomize the records so that you could get
a uniform distribution of records, because it didn't have index
tracks on the first RAMAC.
_KC: So all the indexing had to be performed on the data
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 5
itself?_
JH: In order to get a uniform distribution of records across the
space, you wanted to randomize it. It was a pseudo-random
algorithm that would allow you to reproduce the process and
locate the record.
RJ: The records were in fixed-size pockets, and when the pocket
ran over, there was an address of where the next pocket would
fall.
JH: So if you did get duplication then you'd write trailer
records. The original recording, as I recall, was a straight
conversion. But in later times you got a little more
sophisticated than that, in terms of using frequency versus code
length. And you really didn't do much data compression, in the
classic sense, for a long, long time.
_KC: Because even without any kind of compression, you still had
data densities on the disk files that were more than
competitive?_
JH: Yes. We were always very conservative on the electronics
side of re-writing, because you really had a problem of
reliability as you were updating things in real time, and you
didn't have good backups.
RJ: It's a classic problem -- how do you stack random numbers in
space that tend to be sequential?
JH: When ASD was broken off from the development laboratory [in
May 1959] there were people in Rey's lab who were trying to
convince us that they could record at ten times prevailing
density just by using some data compression and some signal
processing technology, filtering, pre-comp, post-comp -- things
that are all standard now, but they took a long time.
RJ: The thing that has surprised us is that, over these forty
years, the same technology still holds. The moving heads over
the rotating disks and surface; and to this day -- Emil Hoffner,
who has been the most active in signal processing, claims that
he can get at least ten times the density of any system now in
use through new signal processing. And the latest, very
important change that has taken place in the reading head is
that no longer does a signal get its energy out of the speed.
The signal is subject to variation by the presence of the
magnetic bit -- it's magnetostrictive -- so that you can really go
very slowly if necessary and you don't have the same servo
problems. And it gives some increased density in the bargain.
JH: It's been a very extendable technology -- far more than we
ever envisioned.
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 6
_KC: We were talking about that on the way over, how throughout
the rest of computer technology you have succeeding generations
of hardware every 18 months to three years, and yet here at the
core of storage is that same old hard disk, 40 years later,
spinning the way it always did._
_After you moved the lab from Notre Dame Avenue to Julian Street
-- in February of '56 at the Western Joint Computer Conference --
you gave a demo of a device with 50 24-inch disks on a common
spindle, and on those 24-inch disks only the outer five-inch
band was used for data recording. Now why did you use such a
small proportion of the area for data?_
JH: Try to get a disk that big flat!
RJ: Wasn't the disk smaller?
JH: No, it was 24. I don't think we ever built a file less in
those days. The 24-inch criterion came about -- the first file
that we made that worked, had disks made of an almag alloy, a
printer's masterplate for photolithography, dead soft and very
flat. These plates were two feet square, and that became the
constraint of the first disk that we built. We'd set those
plates on a piece of plywood, and use a plywood radial arm with
a centering pin on it and a router. And you'd set the router to
cut the O.D., and then you'd move it to an inner position and
cut the I.D. And that's how we made the first successful disk.
We'd made mockups before, as Rey had described, but this was the
first one you could really read and write on.
RJ: This [in picture from _PG&E Progress_] is Wes Dickinson. He
was a test engineer.
JH: Wes was one of the servo engineers.
RJ: He was sitting at this early model RAMAC disk file, testing
it. One day, the spacers between the drums exploded and flew in
all directions. It cut him on the nose and at a tendon in his
arm, plus a bystander. They had called it a bologna slicer even
before, and with that kind of explosion, we were afraid of the
whole project going down. What we had done is -- because these
spacers had to be fairly thick -- it was very difficult to put
them on and off the spindle. So we cut the disk so that it was
slightly expandable, and thus went on and off easily. We
depended upon the compression upon assembly to hold them.
JH: The way the disk was designed, you had spacers that went
down over a shaft, and spacers were cast iron rings and you
could grind them very accurately for spacing the disks. The disk
rested on a step on the spacer -- I think we used a rubber ring
to compress it against the flat side of the adjacent spacer. So
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 7
we were having trouble, because with the tight fit between the
shaft and the spacer, there was a cocking problem sliding the
spacers down the shaft. A suggestion was made and it seemed
reasonable: you could cut the spacer, because once the disk was
on it, the spacer was contained and couldn't expand. So it was
safe as long as there was a disk on it. What happened -- and a
lot of us wonder why we ever let it happen, but we did: disks
were a hard commodity to come by in those days for test
purposes.... So in order to test the servo you would load up a
spindle with four or five disks on the bottom, and four or five
on the top, and then nothing in between but spacers. And the
compression was the only thing that held them.
_KC: Right, and the spacer came apart._
JH: And once one spacer came apart the rest of them exploded.
And I feel badly about that, because I was one of the design
engineers and should have seen that!
_KC: Let me ask you a question that hadn't occurred to me
before: If these disks were made out of lithography plates, they
aren't the hardest thing in the world. And when you stack those
disks on a vertical spindle, how do you keep them from
drooping?_
JH: The hardness does not relate. You're mixing up two physical
qualities: stiffness and hardness. A stiff material isn't
necessarily hard or soft. You don't make something stiffer by
hardening it. So, yes, it was a soft plate but relatively thick
-- a tenth of an inch thick. The one that Rey showed you here was
one of the production disks, because those lithography plates
were expensive. [For production] We laminated two fifty-
thousandths sheet aluminum disks, and then relied on the
lamination process to get the flatness we needed.
RJ: Basically the disk is held at the center here -- there's no
tendency to droop.
JH: There is a measurable droop from I.D. to O.D.
RJ: Oh yes, very slight, but it's uniform.
JH: Yes, it's uniform. Again, we were in a thousandths-of-an-
inch spacing and that's relatively forgiving. The disks had a
total run-out, probably in those days, of five ten-thousandths.
_KC: Measuring from I.D. to O.D.?_
JH: No, just the ripple. If you spun the disk ...
RJ: I thought it was more than that. But in any case the head
was always positioned against the surface, and to this day is
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 8
positioned against the surface, not to a dimension.
_KC: So that in fact, the total run-out of the disk was a
relatively large multiplier to head gap?_
JH: Always has been, always will be. Even today, although the
disks are very flat, the spacings are very small. And that was
the key problem on the 1301: that the run-out of the disk -- not
the gross run-out, but local run-out of the disk -- was
significant relative to the spacing, which came out; if you've
been into disk technology at all, there is a thing called an
"X"; a measurement of the disk, which is acceleration. We got so
the way we cured the problem was by testing disks looking at the
second derivative of the geometry, and you had to specify that
that second derivative could not be too great.
_KC: Could not be larger than a value which would prove out to a
flat enough disk ..._
JH: The airhead was more forgiving, for various reasons, than
the gliding head.
_KC: The airhead was a guaranteed terrain-following head, in a
way._
RJ: So was the gliding head.
JH: The trouble was, the geometry of the head, compared to the
local flatness of the disk, is relatively the same dimension.
And so the shape of the disk is the same, as if you've misshaped
the head locally. That's a problem that would not be a problem
with an air-fed head, because the air cushion is more stable.
_KC: Right. But when you have a flying head, or what was called
a gliding or sliding head -- the ADF, which became the 1301, was
a slider head, right? And what were some of the problems
associated with that?_
RJ: Resolving the philosophy of whether you needed a curved edge
or a straight edge, how the air got under and stayed there.
JH: To go back in history a ways, if you read classic bearing
theory, Lord Raleigh sometime in the 1800s, 1700s, whatever,
demonstrated that you could polish a penny and then if you held
it against a spinning disk, it would act as a bearing. And so
the fact of the air bearing is old. In fact, Rey commented there
was a company called Sunn Hone that made hones to get very
accurate poles and shafts, and they had a demonstration with a
shaft and a donut, where you could sit and spin the donut, and
it would spin forever on the film of air. They had smooth enough
surfaces.
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 9
_KC: Because the donut and the shaft were matched that closely?_
JH: It's the same thing as a journal bearing in an automobile,
except you're using air as the lubricant, air as the media
between. And there was a classic lubrication theory for such
bearings. The problem is that air is a compressible fluid, and
no one had ever done either systematic experiment or analysis of
bearings with a compressible fluid, strange as it may sound.
That was really the new art.
_KC: It's not so strange as all that, because most bearings had
been lubricated with fluids that were not gasses, and all fluids
that weren't gasses are by definition, incompressible._
JH: Early, the idea of an air bearing had been proposed and it
sounded like it would be a good way of a self-acting bearing, of
building a multiple-head file, which is what we wanted for the
ADF. And we were building them and trying to make them work, and
we just kept having repeated, unexplainable failures. So that's
when we started looking for the shape of the bearing to make a
big difference. It was my first management job and so I said,
"We don't know how flat they are -- let's make them all flat."
That's when we started buying optical flats, and we would polish
them until they were flat, and then they all failed.
_KC: Optically flat heads?_
JH: And they all failed at a given spacing. They would all work
stably until you got to about two hundred micro-inches, and then
they failed. And that was when a very good bearing theorist,
Bill Gross in research, and a programmer, Bill Michaels,
programmed the 650 to do a mesh analysis with a compressible
fluid. Ken Haughton and Russ Bruener were the two individuals
who did the experimental work, and we found that as you curved
[the head] you would achieve a stable bearing. You have to shape
the bearing, you have to have an entry wedge. If you look at
heads today they're flat, but they've got a slope in the front.
_KC: Because if you're going to have air under that two hundred
micro-inches, you've got to provide some way for the air to get
in?_
JH: No, it has to do with -- I don't know an easy way to take you
through it. It's the fact that you have a wedge. The force
generated up is because there is a decreasing spacing, and to do
that you have to have the bearing at an angle. Once you generate
the pressure at the leading edge, there will be the slope that
is necessary to generate the pressure.
_KC: It's literally a hydrodynamic ..._
RJ: From a practical engineer's point of view, if you're going
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 10
this way against the surface, this very last air, here, the last
row of molecules of air, has to move at infinity -- sideways -- to
not move under.
JH: This is not a Bernoulli effect. It is not because you have a
flow under. It is because you're really getting a circulatory
component of the motion. You're in the boundary layer, so the
air against the slider is stationary. On the whole surface of
the head the air is stationary; at the disk it's moving. And you
have a velocity gradient, therefore, in that area. It is the
changing of velocity gradient that produces a normal force.
_KC: And when you had a perfectly flat head ..._
JH: If you have the two of them flat, you will not generate the
kind of a gradient that will give you an upward force.
_KC: So that when you got the perfectly flat head, the optically
flat head close enough to the disk, it just sort of clamped down
onto the disk because there was not proper flow?_
JH: With the non-compressible fluid, you can think of it as a
lever coming back to an imaginary pivot point. As you press down
you will always have an angle until you come into contact. A
simple analogy is if you raised the pivot point a little bit
above the disk, above the flat surface; as you come down you
reach a point at which they become parallel and it collapses.
That's not technically an accurate description, but it's a
visualization.
_KC: It's a good visualization, because I certainly never
understood it before as well as I do now -- calculus or no
calculus._
_Let's go on to talk about the 1311 a little bit, the Low Cost
File, which was the attempt to bring the disk or the disk pack
technology into a format more appealing to IBM's traditional
business customer -- is that accurate?_
JH: The program started after the RAMAC was well underway. There
was a proposal to build a smaller RAMAC -- a half RAMAC, to go to
a lower cost base, and therefore smaller businesses and larger
market. And three of us were assigned as a study by Lou Stevens
to do it. We had to have a disk that was about half the size and
capacity. We actually designed a machine that never, of itself,
came to fruition, but I designed the file. And at that time
there was also an effort in Rey's lab, under Al Hoagland, to
build a single-disk file. And they designed and built a
prototype of an advanced file that had a removable disk. At the
same time someone did a study -- and I've forgotten, was it
[John] Knowland? -- a study of a utility billing application. (By
the way, there's a lot of emphasis today on understanding
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 11
customer problems. In those early days in the lab we spent more
time -- all the engineers -- going out and talking to customers,
not trying to have them tell us what we should build, but to try
and understand how they were running their business.) The
planner said, "If I could have disks that were removable like
tape, I could use them in a mode like tapes, a skip-sequential
processing." Because, although the disk was slower than the tape
in terms of data because it was a serial device and not a
parallel read, you could be competitive -- in fact you could do
the job faster, because you'd skip over the records that you
weren't using, which was the great shortcoming that tape always
had. So this was the application, and in evaluating this
program, I decided that if I was going to build it cheap I had
to cut the capacity down and the disk size -- it started out by
being a half-size RAMAC file, so the disk was going to be 12
inches instead of 24.
_KC: But somehow it ended up 14, didn't it?_
JH: That's because the first time I laid the format of the disk
out, I laid it out with an outer track at 12 inches, and I said,
"Well, it's got to be 13 inches." I went off the program at that
time, but during the later development they were having trouble
with the density at the I.D., and Vic Witt said, "Make the disk
an inch bigger," and that solved the problem. The challenge was
cost; in those days it cost just about twenty-five thousand
dollars to build a RAMAC, and to build the ADF was going to cost
fifty thousand dollars, and I had to build this whole drive for
two thousand dollars, that was the objective I'd been given.
_KC: Two thousand dollars?_
JH: Yes, which was less than the cost of the heads on the ADF. And
so we had to come up with clever, cheap techniques.
RJ: How many did you build?
JH: Probably about twenty thousand. See, in those days, if the
market that we projected was for five thousand of something, that
was a mass market. And there was a very foresighted planner we
worked with on the low-cost file -- Chuck Hester. He wrote a
planning proposal which said we could sell fifty thousand of
these, and everybody thought he was out of his head. Obviously we
didn't -- we didn't sell that many 1311s, but that was because it
was superseded by the 2311.
_KC: But by now, when you talk about much larger sales
projections, I would think we're getting into the period of the
1401 when you could put a small computer, so-to-speak, in an
office without its own air conditioning, without a lot of the
expensive support that large computers had traditionally
required._
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 12
JH: The 1311 was introduced with the 1440, which was a scaled-down
1401. And it was not a very successful product in and of itself,
which is probably why the 1311 didn't sell more than it did.
_KC: You mean the 1440 wasn't?_
JH: The 1440 wasn't. But then they started putting the 1311s on
successive machines, then the [System/]360 came along. The 2311
was the disk file for the 360.
_KC: Right. Just one detail for my personal curiosity: If a 1440
was basically a 1401 with a hard disk, what was a 1410?_
JH: It was scaled up from that. These things -- you're getting into
territorial more than technical.
_KC: In what sense?_
JH: Endicott was the 1400 series; Poughkeepsie was the 700, 7000
series. San Jose had the 305. There was to be a 310 that never saw
the light of day, because Endicott showed that if they took a 1401
base and added this, and this, and this, it was judged to be
better. And you were leveraging off prior development, and the 310
would been a totally new development -- it was not really an
upgrade of the 305.
_KC: Speaking of project-based territoriality, was some of that
responsible for the last super-fast drum memory, the 7320?_
JH: Drums were never a happy product in IBM manufacturing.
Manufacturing drums was never a satisfactory thing.
_KC: Well, you've got a great piece of metal here with a ten-
thousandth's run-out ..._
JH: And plating is a dirty art. They were continued primarily for
the military applications. We had many attempts and then finally
we came out with the fixed-head file. Essentially these were all
driven by the high end of the computer -- it wanted fast access.
_KC: They wanted access that was in proportion to CPU speed
basically, because when you got to the high end, you were paying a
lot for CPU speed._
JH: This was, again, a territorial argument. And you'll notice
that there aren't such things these days.
RJ: Since this is a California computer history, I think the San
Jose site is really history in California, because it was hailed
as the most successful of plants at IBM, and it actually called
for more manpower than any other business in Silicon Valley ...
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 13
_KC: It was financially the most successful of all of IBM's labs?_
JH: It depends on how you measure. I'm just looking at innovation,
of the things that started out here. We had more projects than we
could ever implement, but if you look at the ones that came -- the
whole cash issuing business, mag-stripe credit cards. There's a
whole litany. Talk about compression, some of the early successful
data compression work was done in Rey's lab.
_KC: According to my notes here, the San Jose lab was operated as
a separate facility until 1968. It was an independent thing; it
may at some point have come under the jurisdiction of Advanced
Systems._
RJ: It was always part of the corporate family. It never had the
kind of independence that it has now as an independent subsidiary.
JH: When IBM decided to produce the RAMAC through development as a
product, as Rey said, he didn't think he wanted to be a product
developer. At that time the lab was split, almost exactly when IBM
formed the research division, and Rey's lab became the West Coast
Research Lab. There was a development lab, which remained at 99
Notre Dame, and Rey moved to Julian Street. The development lab
under Lou Stevens developed the RAMAC. I floated back and forth
between the two organizations. And then later, IBM formed the
Advanced Systems Development Division, and again Rey's lab split
into two pieces -- one of which was Advanced Development, which he
took, and then a research lab.
RJ: The lab was called Research and Engineering Laboratory in the
beginning, and my approach to research in the industrial
laboratory was that basic research is almost always necessary, in
order to understand what you're trying to do, so you can do it
better. That was why we hired Al Hoagland very early in the
program, to understand what magnetic surfaces are and how magnetic
heads work. Many of us didn't know that. We hired Dr. Bill Gross
to understand bearings, and we had chemists and people who
understood what we were doing, so we could make a better disk
coating. My own role has always been essentially invention and
design. When the corporation expanded in the R&D direction, they
hired Dr. [Emanuel] Piore as research director. He was in favor of
having advanced development, and exploratory development as part
of research; but he lost the battle somewhere, and so a research
division was founded with a major laboratory in Westchester
County, New York. My laboratory was split -- my physics and
chemistry departments went to research, and I moved my laboratory
up to Los Gatos. In that laboratory we developed a lot of things
that nucleated into products, but they didn't all have the direct
line of product that RAMAC had.
JH: It was a kind of basic research.
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 14
RJ: It was new development. We developed the first cassette for a
video recorder, actually.
_KC: When was that?_
RJ: In the late '60s. Tom Watson looked at this and he said, "You
know, this is a very interesting machine, but we're not in that
business." IBM was working with Sony in Japan. Sony came over and
looked at what we were doing, and they changed their approach to
the one used at Los Gatos -- from a wide spool-to-spool system. Our
contribution was pulling the tape around a spinning head, then
returning it to the cassette. But IBM did not exploit the Los
Gatos laboratory's breakthrough.
The same thing happened in a voice-assisted typewriter project
that Wes Dickinson was working on. We had a thousand-word
typewriter in which you could say, "Dear sir," and the words would
flash up, including all the homonyms. If you said "two," it would
flash _two, to, two, Sioux, chew_, and any other "homonym." It was
a pattern matching system -- it matched the pattern of the person's
previously recorded voice, an analog machine. As happened a number
of times, it didn't work very well when we showed it to Tom
Watson. He went back to New York and inquired of the research
staff, which had worked on voice recognition, and they agreed -- as
we did ourselves -- that it would be years and years before
reliable voice recognition became practical. But that was the
premise I'd started from: no way would you ever be able to build a
universal voice recognition machine with any kind of vocabulary. I
intended to work within a personalized, limited vocabulary to
create a useful typing machine, but I got squelched and it folded.
_KC: And of course that became the core of the great debate over
voice recognition. Is there a market for a machine that has to be
trained to single voices, or do you have to wait until you have
enough computational power to do the whole shot? -- which is a
debate that's going on many more times today._
RJ: Correlated voice patterns work with human assistance. And the
same thing goes for handwriting. There's just no way that you'll
get a universal, reliable handwriting machine -- there's too much
variation in humans as to how they do writing; but you can make a
useful machine that's _not_ universal. We built a model in which
the voice recognition was connected to an adding machine. It
worked with all the decimals and control words; IBM demonstrated
it at the World's Fair in Seattle. We did a lot of interesting
things. I was appointed an IBM Fellow in 1965, I've developed a
lot of learning machines since then.
_KC: But this was a tremendous amount of development. May I point
out, we've taken two hours to go through a fairly summary
description of San Jose's contributions to IBM and to the world at
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 15
large, and I'm sure there are more we haven't even touched on._
JH: The floppy disk.
_KC: I'm not letting that one go by. IBM made the first floppy
disk?_
JH: It was when the Model 4360 went from core memory to
semiconductor. They needed an IPL -- initial program load -- device,
and we were given the task of an IPL device in San Jose. And
[Alan] Shugart had Dave Noble look around and figure out how we
could make an inexpensive form of IPL -- something you'd publish or
initialize, and then distribute. And he looked at a number of
possible predecessors -- one of which had been developed in Rey's
lab by a guy named Bob Tresieder, which was a stretch membrane
disk. I don't know if you've ever heard of that technology; 3M has
pursued it off and on for a fair time. If you take a disk in a
flexible medium, and stretch it uniformly on a circular periphery,
you can then cut a hole out of it, and what you have is a
stretched membrane. And with the circular cut there's no
distortion, because all the forces are radial.
_KC: Everything was released by the circular cut?_
JH: No, it didn't release anything, because there were no radial
forces on the inner edge, but you'd have a stiff thing. David
looked at that and decided to do something simpler, which was: you
just have a flexible disk against a padded surface and press a
head against it, and he showed it would work. The first one,
called MINNOW, was an IPL device for the semiconductor memory
systems, and then as a successor product was developed, we looked
at the application of a read-write device.
_KC: So the first ones, being IPLs, would be read-only?_
JH: They would be read-only in the field; there was a recorder we
built for it in the factory.
_KC: It was like CDs now, because it was recordable in the factory
but read-only in the field? What year was this?_
JH: That was in the early '70s, probably close to 1970. Dave
developed such a thing -- Figaro was the name of the project
initially -- and we couldn't find anybody who was interested in it.
Dave went back and sharpened his pencil, and it became Igar, which
sliced the "F" and the "O" off Figaro. He had a talented, small
group of engineers, and they came out -- essentially -- with the
eight-inch disk product. We were then just starting to see the
keyboard-to-tape Mohawk recorders, and our Rochester lab got the
job of building a direct input device. They were looking at a tape
drive being developed from Boulder, but the guy who ran the
Rochester lab came originally from San Jose -- I had worked with
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 16
him for years. He came out and I showed him this, and we convinced
him that the floppy disk was better for a direct-key input
machine.
_KC: So that was the beginning of key-to-disk?_
JH: Yes, and it was obviously tremendously successful. And we
moved the project from San Jose, first to Boulder and then to
Rochester where it was manufactured. But it was developed in San
Jose....
-------------------------------------------------
BLETCHLEY PARK MOVES FORWARD
-------------------------------------------------
by Chris P. Burton, The Computer Conservation Society
Readers of the ENGINE will be aware that during World War 2, up
to 12,000 people worked at Bletchley Park, fifty miles north of
London, on ultra-secret code-breaking work. Enemy radio messages
were intercepted, the sophisticated encipherments were broken,
and the resulting information used to the Allies' advantage. The
clever work was done by mathematicians, including Alan Turing,
and linguists, while the bulk of the dreary routine work was
done mostly by servicewomen. A large special-purpose electronic
machine, COLOSSUS, was installed there in 1943, followed later
by eleven more. With hindsight, we would probably say that
Colossus was a fixed-program electronic computer, in the same
sense that ENIAC was. Despite the large number of people working
there, a comprehensively observed oath of secrecy prevented any
information about what went on at Bletchley Park (known
affectionately as "BP") leaking out -- until the mid-1970s, when
the existence of Colossus was revealed, but with little
information about the design or use of the machine. In
subsequent years, a few fascinating books about BP have
appeared, sometimes contradictory, and usually tantalizingly
short of key details. There has been no memorial to all those
people who worked tirelessly, in Spartan conditions, most of
them knowing neither what their fellows were doing, nor what
results their own work might have contributed to.
About three years ago the 57-acre park, with its Mansion and
many surviving wartime buildings, appeared at risk of being sold
off for housing development by its owners, British Telecom and
Property Holdings, the agency which looks after real estate for
the government. Some wise people in the neighborhood recognized
the threat to a potentially important heritage site, and formed
the Bletchley Park Trust, which at once appealed for funds to
preserve the estate and to prevent demolition of key historic
buildings. To pay for the property, the Trust plans to set up a
number of museums as a "Museums Campus" for the public, and to
lease out some post-war buildings as office and workshop space
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 17
to paying tenants. Since the formation of the Trust,
negotiations have continued with the owners for acquisition, but
these have not yet reached their conclusion. Recently, however,
a two-year lease on one building was agreed, and permission
granted to allow the public into the Park. These arrangements
allowed the Trust to hold Open Weekends for the public, to have
guided tours of the buildings, and to present various
exhibitions relevant to the wartime effort. At this stage, all
work is being done by volunteers.
All this is highly relevant to the Computer Conservation Society
and to its Secretary, Tony Sale, a founder of the Trust and its
Museums Director. The plan is to establish separate museums of
post-1930s technology, particularly for Cryptography, for
Computing, for Radar and Electronics, and possibly for
Telecommunications and for Air Traffic Control. The museums will
be housed in the numerous and spacious buildings. The whole park
will have a 1940s theme against the background of the code-
breaking work. The Museum of Computing will have adequate space
for workshops and storage, and it is likely that much
restoration done by the CCS will take place there, supplementing
current activities in the science museums at London and
Manchester. While these museums and workshops are established --
a process which will take years -- various exhibitions have been
mounted for the Open Weekends which will sustain public interest
in the project.
Most exciting for computer historians is the ongoing
construction of a working replica of Colossus. This is being
done against great odds, since at the end of the war, Churchill
ordered that the twelve Colossi must be "broken into pieces no
larger than a man's fist", and no significant fragments are
known to remain. If the machine is to be re-created, it must be
done soon and urgently, while memories and experience of the
surviving designers and users can still be tapped.
The Colossus Rebuild Project was launched, and the Bletchley
Park Exhibitions officially declared open, on 18th July by His
Royal Highness the Duke of Kent, patron of the British Computer
Society. This Royal Opening, which I was privileged to attend,
brought welcome public attention to the Trust and its efforts.
For someone who has read about and is fascinated by the wizardry
at BP during the war, but has never visited the place, driving
past its stern warning notices, its security personnel
(civilian, not military!) and its long, low, bomb-proof
buildings brings a lump of nostalgia to the throat. Many of the
buildings, empty since the end of the war, have their windows
boarded over for protection from vandals. You pass the Mansion,
looking exactly as it does in the photos in the books, with the
lawns and trees and the lake below. To actually walk up to the
faded, decrepit wooden Hut 6, where the first decipherings of
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 18
the Enigma machine's traffic were made in 1939 and 1940, and to
place one's hand on the warm wall, almost brings a tear to the
eye. But the winter of 1940 was particularly severe, and one of
the huts was heated by a greenhouse heater! Such uncomfortable
conditions, and such magical, exciting, never-to-be-repeated
work was done in there! Across the way is Hut 11, where the
first Bombes were housed, and over there beyond the green grass
is the utilitarian-looking H-Block, where the first Colossi
worked. In that building are most of the present-day exhibitions
and the rooms where Colossus will be rebuilt.
The Royal Visit day was one of the many very sunny, hot, summer
days that Britain has been blessed with this year. Security was
tight; we had to have our passes applied for and received a week
beforehand. I believe about 800 guests were invited, and I guess
that 600 turned up. Very many of them were elderly former
workers at BP, who had been given dispensation by GCHQ to admit
to the work they did. Last admissions were at 10:30, then the
barriers were closed until about 11:00, when His Royal Highness
arrived and was welcomed by the Lord Lieutenant. The crowds of
guests were unfortunately not allowed to go into any of the
buildings until after the tour by HRH, so they had to wander
round among the trees, and look at the buildings from the
outside for most of the morning. Somewhat tiring in the hot
weather!
The welcoming ceremony was at the Mansion, the focus of the
park, and the party was then driven to the exhibition tour in a
series of beautifully restored WW2 jeeps, with pennants flying
from antennas, driven by uniformed "military police". The Duke's
party was then escorted round the exhibitions by Tony and
Margaret Sale.
In the confines of this article I can only mention a few of the
exhibitions. The first room contained the collections of The
Buckinghamshire Aircraft Recovery Group; sad reminders of the
Battle of Britain and after, wreckage of Spitfires and
Messerschmitts, Junkers and Heinkels, dug from their inadvertent
resting-places in the English countryside. The names of crews
have been traced, and inscribed near what is left of their
machines. A complete but damaged Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, the
type which powered the Spitfire, shows the awful force with
which it hit the ground.
Further along in H-Block, the US Forces Re-Enactment Group have
converted several rooms into part of a US Infantry base. One
room is the GIs' bunkroom, beds made up and lockers tidy, pin-
ups on the wall, and an old radio playing Glenn Miller. Another
is an officer's room, with desk and maps of Europe. There is a
quartermaster's store, and a couple of rooms of memorabilia
pertaining to the US activities leading up to and including the
D-Day invasion. Uniformed "GI"s were on hand to explain things -
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 19
I noticed a present-day US senior officer engrossed in
conversation with one of the guides.
Leaving the Infantry, the visitor next finds himself at the
start of the Cryptology Trail. It is very interesting to move
along the corridors, from room to room, viewing the sequence of
activities starting with the enemy enciphering and transmitting
a message. The intercept room has operational HRO receivers,
where the operators write down the Morse messages, then send the
encoded intercepts through the telegraph exchange and motor-
cycle dispatch riders to "Station X," as Bletchley Park was
known. A mock-up of the registration room leads to the various
stages of decoding and assessment prior to distribution of
intelligence to field-commanders. Visitors can see a real Enigma
machine, with one of the code wheels opened up to display the
random cross-connections, a rare sight. There are also Lorenz
and Siemens telegraph ciphering machines, for which Colossus was
built to crack the wheel settings. The role of the pre-war
Polish codebreakers is not forgotten, but more artifacts will be
needed there, as perhaps also in the decoding stages after
intercepts were registered. It is an interesting exhibition now,
and potentially stunning when work is completed.
Following on after the Cryptology Trail, the visitor enters the
Computer Exhibition, staged by the Computer Conservation
Society. It includes an almost-working Elliott 803, rescued from
a barn, and dating from the mid-1960s. There is an IBM 1130, a
Burroughs Visible Record accounting machine, some Digital
equipment, and an early Sperry drum -- very heavy and parked in
the middle of the room. One member has put on a very good
display of equipment showing the evolution of personal computers
from the Altair, through Northstars and other S-100 bus
machines, to early odd-balls like the Sinclair QL. Appropriate
peripherals and software are on display. The line ends with a
modern 486 PC on loan from Olivetti, which is running my
graphical simulator of the Ferranti Pegasus, thus nicely closing
the loop back to the earliest vacuum tube machines. I had also
provided a working nickel acoustic delay line store, dating from
1956, storing and counting 42 bits, and requiring +300v, +200v,
+13v, -10v, -20v, and -150v, as well as heaters and standard
clock signals. Don't let the children get their fingers too
close to that exhibit! For fun we also had a relay machine,
which I had built in 1952, playing Noughts and Crosses. The Duke
of Kent spent five or ten minutes in the Computer Exhibition,
took a great interest and asked extremely relevant questions. It
was a great pleasure for us manning the exhibition to see that
we had influential support for what we were doing.
Next to the Computer Exhibition is the Electronics and Radar
room. A very large collection of equipment here is primarily
familiar from the World War, and includes BC221 wave meters,
Bendix radio compasses, and masses of British radio equipment
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 20
and radar sets of various kinds. A Baird Televisor from about
1933, with its rotating perforated aluminum disc and neon lamp
behind, gives 30 lines resolution, on a picture about the size
of a large postage stamp. It is most interesting to compare the
manufacturing quality of the wartime military equipment made in
various countries -- German solid and precise, US efficiently
made and neat, Canadian a cross between US and British, and
British, thrown together in a hurry but working in desperate
times. It is rumored that one of the people who have staged that
exhibition has access to 300 tons of wartime electronic
equipment. [Ouch! -- Ed.]
The Duke next moved to the Colossus Rebuild Room, where he met
some of the designers, including the team leader, Dr. Tommy
Flowers, now in his eighties and very alert and knowledgeable.
Stacks of accumulated equipment lie on the floor. A PC running a
CAD system is used for re-creating drawings which would have
been hand-drawn in 1943. A prominent pile of steel channel
sections and angle iron is ready to be cut up, drilled, painted
and assembled for the racks of the machine. Link sockets mounted
on beechwood strips, identical with those used in Colossus, have
been rescued from old Strowger rural telephone exchanges. (The
last of those exchanges will be replaced with digital electronic
equipment and scrapped next year, which shows that the rebuild
project is perilously near to too late even now.)
The Royal Party then embarked on the jeeps, and other VIPs
traveled in a 1940 bus, to see the Motor Pool, with numerous
wartime vehicles preserved and operated by another enthusiasts
group. He then arrived back at the Mansion, where he unveiled a
stone tablet marking the occasion, before entering the Mansion
to see the Winston Churchill exhibition. At last the crowds of
guests could go round the exhibitions themselves, and into the
welcome coolness. Those of us on the stands were now busy for
the rest of the day meeting old friends, explaining what was on
show, and snatching a quick look at the other exhibitions as
well.
What a day! It was a milestone on the long road to the Museums
Campus, and very satisfying to all the volunteers, who had
converged from many parts of the country to make everything
presentable in a very short time. Particularly, the active
members of the Trust are to be congratulated on their vision and
hard work to get so far on almost no funds.
Copyright (c) 1994 Chris P. Burton. All rights reserved.
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 21
-------------------------------------------------
SEX ON CAMPUS, 1969;
California's First ARPANet Host
-------------------------------------------------
by Doug Landauer, Sun Microsystems
Aside from my brief tenure as a teenager with a newspaper route,
every job I've ever had involved writing software. The first one
was at UCLA, in 1969. At that time, Steve Crocker, Jon Postel,
Vint Cerf, Charlie Kline and others were participating in the
beginning of an experiment in the interconnection of computers --
the SDS Sigma 7 at UCLA was going to be connected as the first
non-BBN host on the ARPA network. BBN was (and is) Bolt,
Beranek, and Newman, the Cambridge, Massachusetts based company
which had the contract to provide the hardware, physical
connections, and basic system software that formed the basis of
the ARPA network. They built the "IMPs" (Interface Message
Processors) which formed the homogenous substrate which was the
key simplification that made communication possible among the
variety of systems that were to be connected to this new
network. (Today, BBN continues to be a flourishing business,
with a definite presence on the Internet; they are on the World
Wide Web as http://www.bbn.com.)
My older brother had gone through UCLA four years before I did,
so I had already gotten to play around with some of the other
computer systems on campus. I was a sixteen year old freshman,
hanging out at the UCLA Computer Club, where everyone was known
by their initials -- my brother was CAL, I was DAL. My brother's
friends were JAB, TG&, REG, et al. The Computer Club served as a
combination fraternity house and office, and a home for
socially-challenged, intellectually-gifted, literal-minded
nerds. The club's office was in the Engineering building at
UCLA, which has some of its entrances on the east side, where
the fifth floor is the ground floor, and some of its entrances
on the west side where the ground floor is where you'd expect it
to be.
An aside: One kid that even the clubbies treated as a geek (as
most of them had always been treated) was this high school kid
on some kind of high-school parole -- uh, I mean "honors" --
program that let him spend the summer at UCLA. He was really into
hardware, to the disdain of many of the rest of the clubbies,
most of whom were software types. Anyway, Steve went on to make
probably more impact on the computer industry than any other
person in the history of the Computer Club: he invented the
optical mouse that sits next to nearly every Sun; he founded
Mouse Systems, Frame Technology, and (currently) Infoseek.
Sometimes it's amazing how poor our vision can be, outside of
our own little cliques.
So I was loitering at the club office, along with JAB and TG&,
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 22
when Steve Crocker and Jon Postel came in and wanted to find
some hackers to help write some "network software". It's hard to
convey how new and exclusive both of those words were then, and
how novel it was to combine them! They hired the three of us, to
share an office and write programs.
My job was to write some initial tests just to make sure that
the hardware worked, in the hard-wired link from the host to the
IMP. The network was designed as a network of IMPs, so that the
low level, long-distance communications protocols (hardware and
software) would only need to be implemented once, on the IMPs,
so that they would form an IMP-to-IMP network. Each kind of host
would only need to have one kind of network driver and network
communications software written for them -- host-to-IMP.
Our host was a Sigma 7, a computer made by Scientific Data
Systems. Architecturally, it was a rather ordinary 32-bit
machine. The one most interesting feature that I still recall
about its instruction set architecture was that the general
purpose registers lived in the first 8 or 16 words of memory.
There were no really dominant operating systems at the time (and
there were *no* portable operating systems). The people in
charge of this project decided to use a research OS from one of
the Lawrence Labs (LLL or LBL), called "GORDO". As we added to
this OS, we gave it a new name -- the "Sigma EXecutive" (a.k.a.,
"SEX").
The disk storage on the Sigma 7 was a big silver-colored platter
disk, mounted like a clock, with the axis horizontal. Its
diameter was nearly a meter. We never had a serious mishap with
it, but I always had this fear that if it somehow came off the
end of its spindle, its edge would hit the floor, it would gain
some traction, and would shoot off sideways, through the wall of
the room.
Around that time, the industry's custom was for each instruction
set architecture to have a name for its assembly language. (My
first program was written in IBM 1401 Autocoder, a simple
assembly language.) The Sigma 7's assembly language was called
"Symbol". A later upgrade brought us "Metasymbol", which I
believe added macros (wow!).
The Sigma had a card reader, and could boot-load from it.
Someone (I recall it being Vint Cerf, but I could be wrong) had
written a small boot program, which fit on one card, which could
make the machine chirp like a bird. There was no speaker -- the
program worked by tweaking the RF interference that leaked from
the machine, and a small AM radio had to be placed near the CPU
in order to hear the chirping. The program contained a triply-
nested loop, with relatively prime loop counts. It could go on
for days without repeating itself.
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 23
GORDO/SEX had some very interesting ideas, for the time. With
the notable exception of Multics, most operating systems to date
had only one- or two-level directory systems, or directories
that only privileged users could create, or even worse -- fixed
partitions. SEX was like Multics (and therefore UNIX, MS-DOS,
MacOS, and nearly all currently popular operating systems) in
that directories could contain files or other sub-directories in
a fairly general way. Because this was a moderately new and
relatively less popular idea than it is today, it felt like
quite a privilege to have this kind of power available.
SEX was unlike UNIX in that there was no such thing as an
absolute pathname -- for the normal user. Each user could only
get access to files that appeared to be in sub-directories under
their home directory. So it appeared as if each user had their
own tree-like filesystem. Except that each person had a "Post-
Office" sub-directory, which was shared among all the users, and
it had a "General-Delivery" sub-directory -- these two were used
for e-mail and general file sharing. There was some kind of
super-privileged user, or privileges that could be bestowed on
particular users (I forget which way that worked). The
privileged or super user could see all of the other users'
directories, making the system look a little more like UNIX
systems did, a few years later.
At some point during my time there, Xerox bought SDS, turned
them into XDS, and drove them gradually out of business. Later,
the Sigma 7 was finally replaced with a PDP-11, on which we
(well, they did -- I was no longer working at that job) ran an
operating system called ELF (German for "eleven"). It didn't
take them very long before they decided to replace that OS with
the new, not very well-known OS called UNIX.
So at that point, it could truthfully be said that management
took away our SEX and made us UNIX.
-------------------------------------------------
IC Corner: EARLY IC ALU'S IN THE XEROX ALTO
-------------------------------------------------
by Tom Del Rosso
With reference to constructing a 16-bit CPU for the [Xerox] Alto
by "stacking" four 4-bit ALU's [see July ENGINE page 11,] the
74181 is a standard TTL part from the late 60's. It's not a CPU,
as the 4-bit 4004 was, but only an adder, subtracter, 1's or 2's
complementer, shift right or left mux, and logical AND, OR, XOR
circuit. It contains no registers, and no control logic, so
cascading it is as simple as going from Carry Out of one, to
Carry In on the next. Multiple 74181's share a common control
unit with no complications.
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 24
Since it needs external control, I would have liked to hear
about the control method - hard wired, state machine, or
microcode; I also wonder, how many boards, and how much area.
Great interview though. There was a lot more in there than what
I missed.
The 74181 is barely MSI, not LSI at all. It has around 50 gates,
and it's not much more exciting than an octal latch. So, the
Alto apparently was a real scratch-built machine. Yet the
74xx181 is still in production, just like other members of the
standard TTL family. All the usual speed/power variants, up to
Advanced Low-power Schottky (74ALS181) are still made, with a
relatively new functional variant, the '881.
There are other examples of seemingly obsolete TTL parts still
produced, like the Gray Code and Excess-3 Code converters. But
with the increased availability of modern ASIC's, almost all of
the TTL family must be in very small demand today.
It is somewhat interesting, however, that the 74181 uses a
simple circuit for each bit to compute 16 logical and 16 math
functions, including addition and subtraction. The function is
selected with 4 control inputs, and one logic/math mode input.
The logical functions have the carries disabled for all bits,
and the math functions enable carry.
That core circuit dates 'way back; as "The Art of Digital
Design" (by Winkel and Prosser, Prentice Hall) says, "The
circuit [for a universal logic function generator] has long been
known", but it isn't clear when this development was made. The
book gives the basic one-bit circuit, and you can see the full-
featured version, with the carries that add math functions, in
any modern TTL data book under "74181." In essence, the basic
circuit breaks down to a 4-input to 1-output multiplexer, whose
2 select lines are driven by the 2 operand input bits, and whose
4 data inputs are driven by the function control lines.
It makes me wonder if the designers of the Alto patterned its
instruction set after the 74181 modes. They could have run 5
instruction bits straight into the ALU's 4 control inputs and
logic/math mode input. Their own control circuitry might only be
needed for controlling jumps and stack operations. The disk and
display controllers might have been more complicated than the
CPU control. What I'd really love to see is the Ethernet
interface!
-------------------------------------------------
MORE ON PLASTIC ROT
-------------------------------------------------
Our piece in July's ENGINE on plastic rot -- degradation and
embrittlement of molded plastic parts through exposure to
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 25
ultraviolet light and other environmental influences -- produced
a flurry of discussion from California to the UK. The consensus
is that much more research must be done, but that existing
knowledge is of some use. Edward Then of Imperial College,
London, posted to us that
"You are right to say that [application of] xylene is not the
best solution to the problem of yellowing in plastics. If my
guess is right, the case of the ‘Apple' is made using ABS
plastic, which would be damaged by a xylene-based solvent...."
He promises a short article on contemporary methods of
conserving plastics, to appear in the ENGINE soon.
-------------------------------------------------
ASSURANCE FROM AMERICA ONLINE
-------------------------------------------------
[Several ENGINE subscribers, who received electronic copies
using America Online as a gateway, complained that the issue
arrived in chunks with text missing from the end of one or more
sections. We queried the service and received this reply.]
I am writing on behalf of America Online to answer your recent
questions about the ANALYTICAL ENGINE being truncated when
split.
I sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you.
We are aware of this bug, and are feverishly working to nail it
to the wall. The bug resides in our mail splitting routines. It
is somewhat more destructive to documents than the line-eater
bug of lore. We currently have 5 of our top people working on
it. I assure you it does not target your publication alone.
Should you have any further questions or comments, please feel
free to write again.
Dave Koster
Technical Support Representative
-------------------------------------------------
NEW SUN HARDWARE REFERENCE
-------------------------------------------------
CHAC member James Birdsall has completed Part One of his truly
extensive reference listing of SUN hardware. This section
includes the Overview and CPU/Chassis detail, and as the author
says, is intended
"....to cover Sun-badged hardware in detail sufficient to be
useful to buyers and collectors of used Sun hardware, much of
which comes without documentation. Details on hardware commonly
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 26
used with Suns, especially hardware specifically designed for
Suns, are also included where available.
The next several parts are currently under construction and
include detailed jumper/switch/connector descriptions for as many
individual boards as possible, a Sun part number list, and any
other random facts I can dig up."
Part One is a meticulously researched document that prints out
to about 25 pages in single-spaced ASCII. We have made it
available from our request daemon; to receive a copy, send e-
mail to
engine@win.net
with a _subject_ line of
sunref1
and no message body. You'll receive a copy by return mail.
-------------------------------------------------
NOMADNESS NOTES AVAILABLE
-------------------------------------------------
Steve Roberts, muscular pioneer of mobile computing, now makes
his occasional _Nomadness Notes_ available for remailing from
the ENGINE request daemon. The current issue, #26, is titled
"The Maiden Voyage of the Microship" and details the fascinating
(and harrowing) first outing of the Sea Moss Microship mentioned
in April's ENGINE.
Request this two-part file by sending e-mail to
engine@win.net
with a _subject_ line of
nomad26-1
or
nomad26-2
and no message body. This issue isn't computer history _per se_,
but you'll want this vital background when Steve starts
computerizing the Microship!
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 27
-------------------------------------------------
SPOTTER ALERT
-------------------------------------------------
Copies of the ENGINE, the FAQ, and project information have been
pouring out to print and broadcast media, especially in Silicon
Valley. We do have tearsheets of most of the ink we know about.
But is there ink we haven't heard of? Once more, with feeling:
If you spot any mention of CHAC or the ENGINE in any periodical,
_please_,
* If your copy of the piece is clippable, clip and mail to the
Palo Alto 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 Palo
Alto address.
* If you're too busy for that, just send the publication name,
date and page number and we'll do the hunting.
Thanks! (And thanks to the spotters who have given us invaluable
help with keeping up so far.)
-------------------------------------------------
SPOTTER FLASH
-------------------------------------------------
Radio, radio! CHAC's first, thoroughly enjoyable national
broadcast exposure arrived with the June 7th _Osgood File_ on
CBS. Charles Osgood interviewed KC primarily on the subject of
early micros, especially our SOL-20. (See July's cover.)
"From Glass Houses to Glass Cases," in _CIO Magazine_ for
September 1, gives a thoroughly upbeat assessment of our
vocation's progress. "Computer-history associations are
springing up around the country," it asserts, "and computer
makers are opening museums.... What's more, collectors are
making some serious cash." Short and sweet! Also the first
publication of our new address -- which brought in a fair amount
of mail.
CHAC member Tim Swenson's collection of over fifty computers was
featured in the July 1 _Skywrighter_, newsletter of Wright-
Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio; and Tim made sure to mention
your Association during the interview. Thanks, Tim!
Here's a mystery.... John Jarrell at Children's Mercy Hospital
in Kansas City, MO, e-mailed news of "an article about CHAC in
_Windows Sources_ recently." But no other friend of CHAC has
corroborated the appearance, and two calls to the publishers of
_Windows Sources_ were never returned. If any reader has a copy
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 28
of this page, a quick fax of it to +1 415/856-9914 would be more
than appreciated.
-------------------------------------------------
DESPERATE PLEA FOR MONEY
-------------------------------------------------
It feels to us as if, having moved to Palo Alto, the CHAC has
become much more serious. Being surrounded by institutions and
companies like Stanford University, Hewlett-Packard, Adobe,
Amdahl, DEC, Informix, Oracle, SUN, T/Maker, Xerox.... Frankly,
the list seems endless, and so does the electricity of
inspiration.
These places _do_ want to know about the CHAC. That's what
they've told us! They _will_ hear our case -- that's why they've
begun to invite us in! And they _will_ lend their support.
That's what our faith tells us.
But at such a time, professional appearance becomes all-
important. The ENGINE, our handouts and correspondence, and our
presence on the Net have to have a clean, striking look that
helps the CHAC stand out from thousands of other nonprofits
clamoring for attention. And on our tiny budget, that takes real
ingenuity.
_We_ have the ingenuity if _you_ have the money. A year's
subscription to the hardcopy ENGINE -- by far the more popular
edition -- pays for itself _and_ gives the CHAC twenty-five
energetic dollars. In the heart of Silicon Valley, _making
contact makes money work harder._
Your subscription to the ENGINE now does more for the CHAC than
ever before. And as you receive each new issue, you'll see that
subscribing does more for _you_ too. With your support, the
ENGINE will become a bigger, prettier, more comprehensive
magazine.
Please, if you've been reading the ENGINE as shareware,
subscribe today. It's a better deal than ever.
-------------------------------------------------
AND SPEAKING OF MONEY....
-------------------------------------------------
In July, the CHAC passed a big hurdle; our first ENGINE subs
came up for renewal. Naturally it was only polite, as well as in
our own interest, to let our friends know their subs had
expired.
To begin with, paper copies for expiring subs had yellow address
labels; electronic subscribers were notified by e-mail. _A
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 29
colored address label, or an e-mail notice, will always be your
first warning that your sub is ending._ If you subscribe to the
paper edition, you'll also find a sub blank tucked into your
copy.
Most people re-subscribed, and promptly. (Thank you all.) Some
didn't, so on September 22 we sent out a round of nag letters.
Those brought in most of the rest. (You too.)
It's an industry rule of thumb that, of people who subscribe to
a magazine for one year, 35% will subscribe for a second year.
But of the ENGINE subscribers who were invited to subscribe
again, _eighty-four per cent have so far._ That says a lot
about the CHAC's friends and, we like to think, about the ENGINE
itself.
Note to those who haven't re-upped: For a small nonprofit, nag
letters are expensive and time-consuming. If your ENGINE sub
expires, you get one polite reminder, one sub blank and _one_
nag letter. After that, we assume you know where to find us!
-------------------------------------------------
YOU PUBLISH! OR WE PERISH!
-------------------------------------------------
We hate to say it -- still more to have it said -- but this ENGINE
is a bit thin. Despite a bold request for articles all over
July's back cover, we never received that one extra contribution
that would have given October some real heft.
Now that the word "interactive" seems inseparable from CD drives
and sound cards, we'd like to promote its older, richer and more
personal sense. The ANALYTICAL ENGINE is an interactive
magazine; the people who read it also must write for it, or it
won't be here to read.
If you like reading the ENGINE, please try your hand at an
article. There's no pleasure quite like seeing your best efforts
in print -- a pleasure we'll be thoroughly glad to share.
-------------------------------------------------
OVERVIEW OF BUREAUCRATIC PROCESSES
-------------------------------------------------
INTERNSHIP
-------------------------------------------------
With our nonprofit status accomplished, we can recruit an intern
to help with typing and filing. This is in process -- we've had
an expression of interest from one volunteer. More as it
happens.
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 30
IMPROVED STORAGE
-------------------------------------------------
On August 7th the remainder of the Association's collection and
archive -- including the two minis -- was collected from the El
Cerrito storage and from Aaron Alpar's apartment, and moved to
expanded storage in Redwood City. Volunteer help was crucial to
this process, as was the apparently boundless strength and
experience of Berkeley's Mercury Moving.
At last everything we've acquired is secure in a central
location, but we're now spending more on storage than we can
afford indefinitely. It can't be said too often that WE NEED
SPACE. We've learned in the last eighteen months that time,
money and inspiration -- though often in short supply -- have
always trickled in at a rate that would keep the Association
going; but the struggle for storage is unrelenting. _Please,
help us find a decent home for our collection._
MUSEUM EXHIBIT
-------------------------------------------------
We intend to create a pilot public exhibit of computer hardware
and ephemera, somewhere in the Palo Alto-Mountain View area,
between now and next spring. This is primarily a staff training
exercise, but we'll be delighted to provide guided tours for
visitors. Details to be announced.
ANOTHER ROUND WITH VISA PROVIDERS
-------------------------------------------------
CHAC is negotiating with two more credit-card providers, one in
Palo Alto and one in San Diego, and we'd say our chances of
success are improving. With luck, paying for an ENGINE sub will
shortly be a lot easier -- especially for international
customers. Thanks for your patience!
-------------------------------------------------
Book Review:
COMPUTERS IN SPACE: Journeys with NASA
Dr. James E. Tomayko
Indianapolis, IN: Alpha Books, 1994
197 pages, US$20.00 (paper)
ISBN 1-56761-463-9
Reviewed by Kip Crosby
-------------------------------------------------
Only a few people have flown in space, and many of them are
legendary. Only a few computers have flown in space, and most of
them are completely obscure. Is this fair? To redress the
balance, we need a big, breezy, copiously illustrated book
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 31
written by someone with a reporter's persistence and a _Jeopardy_
contestant's appetite for odd facts. Luckily, this is it.
Spaceflight computing forces the unlikely to do the improbable
with the insufficient. Ounces count, cubic inches vanish, and
working conditions are dismal. (The Honeywell control computers
for the Shuttle's main engine are bolted to the combustion
chamber.) Parts take so long to certify that they're obsolete
when they reach space. (The microprocessors on Galileo were RCA
1802's -- early-seventies chips for a 1989 launch.) One bug in
the software can result in catastrophic malfunction. (So long,
Soviet Phobos probe.) Yet these computers routinely must be far
more reliable than their pampered earthbound cousins. This
thread of contradiction, of raw technical brilliance outplaying
bizarre poverty of resources, keeps a fascinating tension in
Tomayko's story.
Psychological tension plays a part as well. In early suborbital
and orbital missions -- Mercury, Gemini and Vostok -- astronauts
and cosmonauts apparently had very little to do, except during
takeoff and landing. Since most spacefarers are pilots foremost,
this gave rise to a natural resentment of being "Spam in a can,"
human supercargo included for the sake of prestige; and this
resentment often was transferred to the computers, which were
perceived as stealing the pilot's thunder.
Yet, on a steady diet of abuse and ingratitude, computers
flourished and finally became indispensable to spaceflight.
Whether in simulation, command, navigation or information
retrieval, these toughened boxes have become hand-in-glove
partners of the pilots and controllers who rely on them. Jim
Tomayko, who knows his stuff, takes his reader on a grand tour
of the subject, starting with computer simulators, preflight
testing, launch and mission control, then plunging into the
history of Mercury and Gemini, Apollo, the Shuttle, and the
unmanned probes including Viking, Ranger, Mariner, Phobos and
Galileo.
This is a big job and the author brings two big advantages to
it. The first is an easy, colloquial style, so that although the
story has to be salted with acronyms, it always avoids the
blockishness of manual-ese. The second is dozens on dozens of
photos from NASA itself, IBM, JPL, Draper Labs, Lockheed, and
many other sources, supplemented by schematics, panel drawings,
and an occasional graph. Whenever the text even _threatens_ to
become opaque -- bam! -- there's an illustration or a sidebar.
Together these lift the story out of "NASA as a second language"
into the realm of vivid, compelling technical history.
_Computers in Space_ will be accessible to high-school students,
yet consistently rewarding to seasoned space freaks, who will
repeatedly mutter "[expletive,] I never knew that."
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 32
In fact, though, this book's breadth of appeal gives rise to my
only reservation about it. More than a textbook, not quite a
coffee-table book, it zigzags uneasily between the two ideals.
Occasional clinkers of stodgy phrasing are transparent attempts
at simplicity. Italicized words and phrases are scattered
through the text, but the typographical convention doesn't seem
related to anything; sometimes these terms are defined as they
occur, sometimes not. (Such definitions as are needed might have
been better off segregated in a glossary at the back.) I suspect
that this quirky emphasis was forced on the book by an editor,
and it doesn't do any real harm.
This is a good book at the right time. Read it and you'll
understand, not only the trials and tribulations of computing in
space, but its detective work, its leaps of faith and
brilliance, and its civilian spinoffs, like programmed
redundancy and fly-by-wire control. The lavish beauty and
unrelenting detail of _Computers in Space_ make it a book you'll
want to read avidly, then keep in your permanent library.
-------------------------------------------------
ACQUISITIONS
-------------------------------------------------
ALTOS 1000 MINI
This tower-case mini comes to CHAC as a deeply appreciated
donation from Frank McConnell.
The Model 1000, Altos' most successful product ever, was first
released about eight years ago and has a reputation of being rock-
solid. (Kim Naru at HP Cupertino, who sold this one, remembers
that during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake a comparable 1000
toppled out of its rack and kept working.) Many of these boxes
are still in use for communications-intensive jobs such as
payroll.
This particular Altos has an Intel 386/20 CPU, 16 mb RAM, a
140MB SCSI hard disk, 250MB SCSI cartridge tape, 13 serial ports
installed of a possible 256, built-in Ethernet, a 5.25 floppy
drive, a Wyse terminal, and SCO UNIX on tape. Dusty deck? Like
heck! We might use it as an e-mail server.
-------------------------------------------------
LETTERS
-------------------------------------------------
APPRECIATION FROM SOUTH AFRICA
-------------------------------------------------
Hi there Americans!
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 33
Found a January copy of your newsletter skulking away on a
forgotten mainframe the other day. Must say I enjoyed it. Just
love what you are doing to preserve the heritage of our so-new
but yet so neglected history. I cringe when I think that the
original Colossus and its mates were chopped up after the war
without any attempt to preserve even one of these machines. I
can remember a local university dismembering (in the early
seventies) its vintage 50's computer and selling off the bits to
local Ham radio buffs. Nobody really thought about preserving
these things then. Just an outdated and outmoded hassle to be
got rid of! I would love to help financially but three things
prevent this: Our exchange rate is so poor that it take a week's
wages to get $50, I at present cannot afford a week's wages, and
it is becoming increasingly difficult to get money out of this
country. But my thoughts are with you anyway!
God bless!
Eugene L. Griessel, Sysop, DYNAGEN
MORE ON THE CANON CAT
-------------------------------------------------
I think the Canon Cat is version 2. Version 1 was the Swyftcard,
a plug-in ROM card for the Apple //e that turned it into
something Cat-like. Jef Raskin came to a Washington Apple Pi
meeting way back when to give a presentation and demo the thing.
It was pretty nifty, and obviously designed to be simple,
general, and powerful. The things that stick out in my memory:
(`) available at power-on (which was why it was in ROM). (a) No
DOS, diskette directories, or formatting. You just stuck a disk
in, pressed <save>, and whatever happened to be in memory at the
time got written on the floppy in one format-and-save operation.
(b) There was some support for telecommunications in the thing.
(c) There was some way to escape into a FORTH-like language for
extensions. You wrote your "source" as part of the in-memory
document. This wasn't expected to be used by most folks. (d)
There was some way to partition the in-memory document, so you
could have (e.g.) a letter and an address database for mail-
merge kinds of things.
If I dig around I can probably find my old WAP Journals and
maybe find a review (maybe even with a mention of the meeting).
Frank McConnell
CD-ROM DATABASE OF IC'S
-------------------------------------------------
There is a CDrom index of all currently manufactured electronic
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 34
components, everything from ICs to transistors to relays and
resistors. We have it at the U of Iowa Libraries. It runs into
hundreds of CDroms, because they store a fax-style image of the
data sheet for each device in the index. The problem, from the
CHAC point of view, is that when the publisher releases updates,
they recall the disks that have been updated, and as chips fall
out of production, their documentation fades -- first, the data
sheet goes, then the pinout, and so on. Still, the thing is
useful. I've found essentially all the rare semicustom chips
used in the PDP-8/E in the index, and in most cases, I've found
current local distributors for the modern pin-compatible
replacements for these chips.
The Librarians call the product the IC-discrete database; it is
published by Information Handling Services, 15 Inverness Way
East, Englewood CO 80112-5704.
Doug Jones
jones@cs.uiowa.edu
-------------------------------------------------
Some IC databases do exist in electronic form for several
purposes, like CAD circuit design and automated testing.
Unfortunately, they are parts of commercial packages.
There was even one module for the Commodore 64 by REX
Datentechnik, which recognizes 74-series digital ICs. It even
tells whether the chip has standard or open-collector outputs.
The method of identifying unknown ICs is discussed in "How to
Identify Unmarked IC's" (BP101) by Kenneth H. Recorr. ISBN 0
85934 076 7 Bernard Babani (publishing) Ltd. 1982. Fold-out
sheet 640 x 450 mm. Cover size 176 x 120 mm. Originally
published as an article in "RADIO-ELECTRONICS" magazine.
There has been several attempts made to collect and cross-
index the IC catalogs or databases that already exist, but the
IC Master seems to be the only large and organized project.
Title: IC MASTER
Part Title: 1985
Publication: Garden City, NY : Hearst Business Communications
Publ. (Part): , 1985
Mater.(Part): 2 parts <5294> s. : kuv
The newest volume in our library seems to come in three parts:
Title: IC MASTER : 1989
Part Title: 1 : Integrated circuit selection guides, indexes &
directories
Publication: Garden City, N. Y. : Hearst Business Communication
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 35
Publ. (Part): , 1989
Mater.(Part): 1944 s
Title: IC MASTER : 1989
Part Title: 2 : Manufacturers & dist. directory, advertisers
product index, advertisers technical data
Publication: Garden City, N. Y. : Hearst Business Communications
Publ. (Part): , 1989
Mater.(Part): S. 2001-3469
Title: IC MASTER : 1989
Part Title: 3 : ASIC/custom & design automation, P development
systems, microcomputer boards
Publication: Garden City, N. Y. : Hearst Business Communications
Publ. (Part): , 1989
Mater.(Part): S. 4001-5064
Without any doubt, it is the best reference for ICs. Is has
references both by operation and part number. The main index is
by part numbers in alphabetic order. Alas, they remove
"obsolete" entries each year, but too soon, I would say. So, you
need several volumes for full coverage.
As I mentioned, also smaller attempts have been made. All my
equivalence books come from the same source:
International Diode Equivalents Guide (BP 108)
Adrian Michaels
ISBN 0 85934 083 X Bernard Babani (publishing) Ltd.
1982. 144 pages.
International Transistor Equivalents Guide (BP 85)
Adrian Michaels
ISBN 0 85934 060 0 Bernard Babani (publishing) Ltd.
1981. Reprinted 1988. 320 pages.
Digital IC Equivalents and Pin Connections (BP 140)
Adrian Michaels
ISBN 0 85934 115 1 Bernard Babani (publishing) Ltd.
1985. 320 pages.
Linear IC Equivalents and Pin Connections (BP 141)
Adrian Michaels
ISBN 0 85934 116 X Bernard Babani (publishing) Ltd.
1985. Reprinted 1987. 256 pages.
There are also others, each of which is touted to take advantage
of "the latest computerized techniques".
Their address is:
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 36
Bernard Babani (publishing) Ltd.
The Grampians
Shepherds Bush Road
London W6 7NF
England
Jouko Valta
FTP SITE FOR CIRCUIT DIAGRAM REFERENCE
-------------------------------------------------
Archive-Name: auto/sci.electronics/ftp-site-with-16-000-circuit-
references
It seems to me that at least half of the posting here are
concerned with circuit-related questions. Many would be answered
by a database that we have recently mounted on an anonymous ftp
site. The database contains the following features:
-SHAREWARE (requires registration for continued use or
distribution)
-menu-driven front end to allow searches on devices and keywords
on titles or circuit abstracts
-dBASE-compatible format for those wishing to search other
fields
-references to >16,000 articles/papers containing practical
electronic circuit designs, from >350 different
magazines/journals
-availability of photocopy/fax of most original articles (author
registered with CCC [Copyright Clearance Center])
-covers virtually every field of science and technology
-updates (annually or semi-annually, depending on response)
To download, ftp to gaitlab1.uwaterloo.ca and log in as
"anonymous". The main database (~3M PKZIPped, ~10M after
PKUNZIPping) is contained under /pub/circuits/main
A smaller demo version (if you want to try it first) is under
/pub/circuits/demo
Be sure to give a bin command before getting these files.
Suggestions, comments, questions and any other feedback would be
appreciated.
Peter Sawatzky
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 37
HP 110 INFO: WELL, WE ASKED!
-------------------------------------------------
There were two flavors of Portable: the HP 110, called the
Portable, and something else of unknown model called the
Portable Plus. Neither was PC compatible (nor were they HP 150
compatible, which was widely regarded as a bonehead move,
although both would run plain-jane MS-DOS applications). Both
came out of the Corvallis Portable Computing Division.
I had access to a couple of Portables at my previous job at
University of Maryland. They didn't get enough use (they were
check-out-able) to entice us into trying further experiments
with portable computers until after HP had dropped the Portable
Plus, so I don't know much about the Plus. Last time I was back
there I noticed that one of the Portables was still back in the
datacomm room with a cable I'd made for it so it could be
plugged into most of the asynchronous modems we had for a quick
reprogramming.
The Portable was a little laptop-of-sorts (really smaller than
most laptops, more like a thick notebook) with an 80C86 CPU,
80x16 non-backlit LCD display, keyboard with somewhat
abbreviated key travel and 1-key rollover, 300 baud modem,
serial port, and HP-IL interface loop. It had enough ROM to hold
MS-DOS 2.something, PAM, MemoMaker (for simple word processing),
Lotus 1-2-3 (version 1A, I think), a terminal emulator with
XMODEM support, and probably some other stuff that I've since
forgotten.
When I first got the 95LX palmtop I was reminded very strongly
of the Portable -- they both did about the same sorts of things
in as small a package as was practical for the technology of the
day, and both used execute-in-place ROM code to maximize
available RAM. But I'm getting off track....
The Portable had enough RAM (512KB?) that you could split it
between the RAM disk and system RAM and still get stuff done.
(You could move the partition.) If you really needed more disk
space, or needed to exchange files, there was a battery-powered
3.5" drive (the 9114) that could connect up via HP-IL. You could
also hook a printer (ThinkJet) up that way.
Once upon a time I took the Portable and disk home to do some
Pascal programming (using the HP-supplied Microsoft Pascal
compiler). I never tried this again, for several reasons:
(a) The disk was dog slow. Given that HP-IL is a two-wire serial
loop, this isn't too surprising.
(b) The display, not being backlit, worked fine in full daylight
or an office with good fluorescent lighting. In my poorly-lit
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 38
bedroom I had a choice between not having enough light to see
what was on the screen, or having enough light with too much
glare to see what was on the screen.
(c) The keyboard had a short travel and 1-key rollover -- it was
uncomfortable to use at first, and once I got used to it, it
dropped characters on me. Grrr.
That said, there's still a lot of people who swear by these
machines; they hold up to abuse very well, and if you can get
what you want to fit in the machine itself most of the time (and
have good light to work in) they're relatively hassle-free.
The Portable Plus had some other goodies, like 80x24 display,
more RAM, and a couple of ROM drawers in which you could install
applications. I remember thinking that this would probably have
been a lot better for us because we could have got WRQ's
Reflection (HP terminal emulation) in one of those ROM drawers.
(No, the built-in datacomm program didn't emulate an HP terminal
beyond doing ENQ/ACK flow control.)
I also recall that there was a third party who would modify the
display on the Plus to include a backlight. Of course, this cost
you running time as the battery drained that much more quickly.
Frank McConnell
ONLINE COMPUTER COLLECTOR'S MARKETPLACE FROM UNUSUAL SYSTEMS
-------------------------------------------------
How would you describe the difference between the histories you
publish and those published in the _Annals_? As you know from my
flyer on the Commercial Computing Museum, I'm a grass-roots
kinda guy and I'm trying to preserve the grass-roots history of
a typically very complex subject matter. Your pub, and David's
[_Historically Brewed_] too, are so important that I don't see
them as amateur compared to the _Annals_; they are instead
another side of the same history.
Because you've included mention of my work several times I want
to make sure you understand that my museum would be a private,
for profit venture.
My book will be available in September. There are ad's in the
next issues of the _Annals_ and _HB_. What does a computer
collector do when he's done his book? He's begins his new online
service for collectors called the Online Computer Collector's
Marketplace. Will it be on the Internet? Nope, not until I can
finance my own WWW server and anyway there are way more people
out there with PC's and modems than there are with USENET id's.
Will it run on a PC as a BBS? Nah, it would be hypocritical to
buy n'sell old computers on a Pentium, so the Marketplace will
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 39
run off a multi-user MAI, Honeywell, or GEAC (remember good ol'
GEAC?). I'll send you more material on this system in October.
Thank you for your attention. Take care and be full of care.
Kevin Stumpf
MICROPROGRAMMING AND PAGING: REPLY TO ROBERTSON
-------------------------------------------------
Andrew Robertson asked:
1.) Which were the first computers to use microprogrammed
architectures as opposed to hardwired architectures?
Babbage's analytical engine was to be microprogrammed. The
prototype mill (CPU) for the engine, built by his son around a
century ago was microprogrammed. This machine is currently
housed in the Science Museum in London. The microprogram was
stored on a music-box mechanism, right next to the hand crank on
the lower right side of the mill.
Microprogramming was reinvented in the 1950's by Wilkes. The
technology that made microprogramming of electronic computers
feasible in the 50's but not in the 40's was the widespread
availability of inexpensive solid state switching diodes -- early
microprograms were stored on hand-wired diode matrices. Read
"Memoirs of a Computer Pioneer" by Wilkes.
Microprogramming was reinvented again in the 1960's by the
people at Hewlett Packard who developed the 9100 calculator.
Computer Structures, Readings and Examples, by Bell and Newell
covers this in one chapter. Don't confuse this early 1970's book
with the later edition! The two editions of this book are
essentially different! Any computer historian needs to have both
editions!
3.) Which were the first computers to use paging of RAM or
ROM memory?
Atlas, built by Ferranti, was the first machine to support
demand paged virtual memory, where page faults led to the
transfer of pages between core memory and drum. This is a 1960
technology! The key papers on this were: "The Atlas Supervisor,"
by Kilburn and Payne, in the proceedings of the 1961 Eastern
Joint Computer Conference, and "The Atlas Scheduling System," in
_The Computer Journal_, 1962, page 238. If you look in Bell and
Newell, you'll find this reprinted.
Of course, the word paging is ambiguous, as it also refers to an
address space expansion technique, as used, for example, on
machines as varied as the 6800, the PDP-8, the DDP 516 and the
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 40
SDS 930. On these, the direct address field of an instruction
couldn't address all of memory, so memory was divided into
pages. Direct addresses referred only to locations on the
current page, as determined by the high bits of the program
counter. Indirect addresses could reference any memory location.
Again, Bell and Newell contains the answers you want!
Doug Jones
jones@cs.uiowa.edu
KRAUSE ON HADDOCK
-------------------------------------------------
I bought this book in the computer museum in Boston, and I think
it's worth $14.95. It contains photos (partially in a poor
quality) of many (perhaps 50%) of the computers, and short
summary of the systems: in most cases CPU-type, clock rate
memory size and kind of periphery. No technical details.
There is also a collector's value, but I don't know if that
makes sense: here in Germany I can find an Osborne 1 on one flea
market for $25 with full docs, and on the next for about $1000.
There are two lacks in my eyes in this book: There is no
description of the Intersil IM 6100 single board computers, the
Intersil 6960 sampler and the Intercept Junior system. Only on
page 41 is a short description of the Intersil IM6100 with a
serial interface; I think he is speaking about the Intersil
sampler without having any information about it. But it is
probably impossible to list every microcomputer system that ever
existed.
The second, more severe lack is the complete absence of the
early development systems: Intel Intellec 4 / 40 / 8 and 8-80,
NSC Pacer, Signetics Twin and so on. They should be included in
such a book, because they are certainly available on flea
markets and in surplus stores and they are worth to be
collected.
The main value of this book is for identifying an unknown micro
computer system which is announced without any other
information: 'Xitan Alpha 2 to sell, no information available'.
Klemens Krause
Universitaet Stuttgart
SOURCES WANTED ON EARLY COMMERCIAL SOFTWARE
-------------------------------------------------
Does anyone know of a good book where I can find some
reading material on the early commercial software industry,
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 41
going back to the early 1960's and 1970's?
Obviously this would be mostly mainframe and some mini-
companies, such as Computer Sciences Corporation or Management
Science Atlanta, etc...
I am doing some research in this area and I am finding that
while there is a lot of stuff on hardware companies at that time
(particularly IBM), no one seems to have documented much on the
software industry (not hackers but legit businesses) until
micro-computers rolled around in 1976. Any suggestions or ideas?
Robert Dubicki
SOURCE FOR TELETYPE PAPER (YAY!)
-------------------------------------------------
CANARY TELETYPE
Paper, that is. You get a giant roll, 8-1/2" wide by very long
on a one inch core. How long? The OD of the roll is 4-5/8" and
it weighs about 3.5 lbs. We are not about to unroll it and
measure but it is a lot. [I think it was 300 feet. -- Ric] It is
Comcode No. 400 214 110 and the stuff they used to print
teletypes and telexes on. They still may, for all we know. Try
it for a group project drawing a frieze for the classroom. Or a
"Happy Birthday, Grandma!" banner. Or mount it on a rod near the
telephone as an endless message pad.
22261 Paper Roll, 8-1/2" wide $3.50/each
Address: American Science and Surplus
3605 Howard Street
Skokie IL 60076
Order phone: 708-982-0870 (0800-1750 CDT)
$10 minimum plus shipping charges ($4.50 on up to $20 order)
Eric (Ric) Werme
SMOKE SIGNAL BROADCASTING: A BRIEF HISTORY
-------------------------------------------------
Here's a little bit of extra info about Smoke Signal
Broadcasting that I can contribute. Their address in 1977 was:
Smoke Signal Broadcasting
P.O. Box 2017
Hollywood, CA 90028
(Phone: 213-462-5652)
By the end of 1978, it was:
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 42
Smoke Signal Broadcasting
31336 Via Colinas
Westlake Village, CA 91361
(Phone: 213-889-9340)
I think that they kept the latter address for a while. As Kip
says, their boards and systems were fully compatible with the
SWTPC (Southwest Technical Products Corporation) SS-50 bus. This
was a pretty cool bus which competed with the S-100 bus in its
day - the most interesting thing about it, to me, is the fact
the SWTPC motherboards had twin rows of 25 fairly thick pins,
rather than a card-edge socket like S-100 machines. The SWTPC
boards then had the sockets/connectors for these pins. A
reasonable number of other companies, besides SWTPC and Smoke
Signal Broadcasting, also made boards and other add-ons for SS-
50 bus systems.
At any rate, most of the early Smoke Signal Broadcasting (SSB,
from here on) offerings were add-ons for SWTPC systems, such as
a floppy disk system (Basic Floppy Disk System - BFD-68) that
came with patches for SWTPC BASIC and the resident
editor/assembler, a 16K static memory board (M-16A), various
configurations of EPROM boards (P-38) with an external power
supply kit, an external EPROM programmer (POP-1), and later
floppy drive subsystems like the 8" LFD-68 single and double
floppy systems. Slightly later (mid/late 1978?), they offered
complete systems called the "Chieftain", as Kip mentioned. At
least originally, these were 6800 systems - maybe they used
6809s later. The Chieftain I used 5.25" floppies, while the
Chieftain II used 8" disks. They both ran DOS68, Smoke Signal's
disk operating system, and came standard with 32K of memory
(expandable to 64K), a 9-slot motherboard, and a cabinet
finished in leather-grain, which (I guess) was in keeping with
their Native American motif and logo. I really don't know
anything about their later systems.
Smoke Signal Broadcasting also offered software, such as a 6800
FORTRAN compiler. The software ran under DOS68 on SSB systems,
and came with a copy of DOS68 and hardware mods (?) for SWTPC
system owners. I assume that SWTPC system owners who ran SSB
software had to run DOS68 rather than SWTPC OS's such as FDOS or
FLEX.
Bill von Hagen, wvh@transarc.com
-------------------------------------------------
QUERIES
-------------------------------------------------
[Queries are sorted by subject, and within that, by model if
applicable.
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 43
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 Palo Alto address,
and we will store and forward.
APRICOT PC XI
-------------------------------------------------
I've just had an Apricot PC XI come into my possession. It's a
8088 based machine similar to an IBM PC, but not 100%
compatible. According to the documentation that came with it
there exists a program for it called IBM, which would allow it
to run PC software. Not surprisingly this program didn't come
with it.
Does anybody have this software? Please email me if you can
help.
Many thanks,
Bob Entwhistle, bob@wimpol.demon.co.uk
ATARI 400
-------------------------------------------------
The very first computer I ever owned and operated was the ATARI
400. I had it fully equipped, with a thermal printer, 300 baud
modem, and a tape drive. A few years ago I sold it at a garage
sale, after I had moved onto bigger and better systems
(Commodore 64, ATARI 1040ST). Unfortunately, I miss the classic
video games that I had with it: Pac Man, Dig Dug, Star Raiders,
Pole Position, just to name a few. I know a few of these games
were ported to the IBM compatibles, but the only ones I've come
across are ancient and don't take advantage of VGA graphics and
Sound Blaster sound. Are there any high quality versions of the
classic video games we grew up on, or am I going to have to buy
an old ATARI?
Thanks,
Justin Davenport, justinad@vt.edu
BIRTHDATES....
-------------------------------------------------
Does anyone know the birthdates of Bill Atkinson, Ted Nelson,
Peter Vogel (Fairlight Music Workstation inventor) or James
Moorer (3-D analysis of music waveforms at Stanford in the
70's)? I'm putting together a timeline project and having
trouble tracking these down.
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 44
Thanks in advance.
Dave Williams, dwilliam@ilstu.edu
BURROUGHS B 91
-------------------------------------------------
I'm trying to refurbish a B 91, in particular I'm looking for a
CMS bootable disk.
Anyone know where such a beast can be found?
Thanks all,
Eric -B91- Salem
COMMODORE VIC-20
-------------------------------------------------
I have had a VIC-20 since '82, but I haven't touched it for
about 8 years now. The problem is that at that time I *knew*
everything so I didn't write it down. Later I have been through
University, work and lots of different machines, and my
knowledge about VIC-20 has gone beyond reach.
I bought a "turbo tape" for it (from England), but the
instructions are gone after various moves. This was an add-on
chip (cartridge). I have an expansion board with 5 slots, 32K
RAM, debugger, graphics, games, ... I can manually set which
memory locations the RAM should use.
Thus for the turbo tape I need to know what memory location it
is at, where it starts (the memory location to "sys ...") and
instructions for use. I remember something about "<-L ...", and
then there was something different for fixed-location files.
Instructions for the assembler-part would be nice too. I need
this to be able to run "old" programs and games that I have on
tape. Information will be greatly appreciated! (or pointers to
information.)
Bjorn Halvor Solberg
COMPAQ PORTABLE BIOS
-------------------------------------------------
In trying to rescue an original Compaq portable (2 FD, 512K)
from a date with the salvage company, I seem to have run into a
bit of a problem. Apparently my Compaq has BIOS revision B, a
fairly early revision. Because of this, I am experiencing three
big problems:
1. I am limited to 544K of memory.
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 45
2. I can't seem to get any rev of DOS later than 3.0 to boot.
3. It steadfastly refuses to look at the nice WD1002 and disk
I found for it. :-(
According to Compaq tech support, a Rev. C BIOS or later will
fix problem 1. (They couldn't tell about the other two.)
Unfortunately, BIOS upgrades for the original portable are no
longer available. :-( I have even tried one of the larger
aftermarket BIOS dealers and was told the same thing.
By some chance, does anyone have a Rev. C BIOS from a Compaq
portable or Compaq Plus that has gone on to meet its maker? As
an alternative, I have access to an EPROM programmer; is there
anyone out there who could send me a dump of the BIOS. (BTW,
what kind of EPROM would I need?) ....I am willing to prove that
I do, in fact, own the Compaq.
As a sort of alternative, a long time ago, when I bought my
first XT disk upgrade, I seem to remember a utility disk coming
with it. On this disk was a sort of "pre-boot" utility that
would allow original IBM PC's (not XT's) which had old BIOSes to
see and to boot from an HD. Would anyone still happen to have
such a program lying around?
Thanks in advance...
John Ruschmeyer
COMPUTER AUTOMATION
-------------------------------------------------
Can anyone give me a short history/status on Computer Automation
computers? Their mini was used as process controller on many of
the Korad Lasers that I worked on during the late 70's. I
haven't seen their equipment used or advertised lately.
Michael Robertson
DATAPOINT 2200
-------------------------------------------------
I have one completely working CTC Datapoint 2200 "PC" and would
like to get some software and documentation to it. I bought
($0.2) this machine from local paper mill where it was used for
warehouse book-keeping and inventory from 1975 to 1993. Nowadays
there is a HP mainframe/Reflection/Windows combination doing
(well, if those 386 PCs had to be replaced with 486s, you can
draw your own conclusion) this job.
Other than that book-keeping program, I don't have any other
material for this boat anchor and would be interested getting
some sort of operating system, etc. for it. I would also like to
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 46
see those articles mentioned couple of days ago in these
magazines: American Heritage of Invention & Technology, fall
1994 and Analytical Engine, January.
Some notes about this overweight typewriter to those not
familiar with it: it is a complete computer including a
keyboard, a green CRT and two cassette drives. This one has got
whopping 12 kilobytes of RAM (16 max) on three 15x20 cm "SIMMs".
There are _fifteen_ printed circuit boards in it and the cooling
plate is adequate for a dozen of Pentiums. Also those logics on
cassette drives would make your ordinary tape deck jealous.
If you can help, please contact following address, thanks.
Jari Porhio, eppu@cc.tut.fi
GENERAL INSTRUMENT SOUND CHIP
-------------------------------------------------
Has anyone out there used the "Noisemaker" card on an S-100 or
Apple II system?
Does anyone have the application note that engineers at General
Instruments (now Microchip), possibly on an unofficial basis,
issued on the AY-3-8910 sound chip? They also produced a 28-pin
'8912 which didn't have the I/O port. I have heard that the
'8910 was actually developed by Western Digital, and that W.D.
engineers may really have been responsible for the Application
Note; I have not been able to confirm this.
What I'm looking for is not the Data Sheets. This Application
Note was put together by some engineers; it's 40 pages or more,
and it's typewritten with hand-drawn drawings. It's not typeset.
I'm looking for information on making better-sounding sounds,
besides simple beep tones. I want to make it sound like a bell
ringing...
Boston-Baden, hazel-chaz@netcom.com
ITS (YES, THAT ITS....)
-------------------------------------------------
I'm looking for any information you might have about the
Incompatible Time-sharing System. If you have manuals or any
documentation what so every available online, please get in
touch with me. Pointers to any (paper) documentation are also
welcome.
Mikael Cardell, mc%closet@lysator.liu.se
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 47
MEMOTECH
-------------------------------------------------
Has anyone had any in-depth experience with Memotech's machines?
I have a MTX 512 non-disk unit. The machine was also
available with floppy and/or hard disk configuration (although
as I recall, that version had a separate box for the computer
and a separate keyboard. Mine is the 'all-in one' version with
the RF modulator. I was wondering if this machine could utilize
the CP/M supplied with the disk system. There were some other
differences besides the disk controller. The disk units had 80
column cards and also one-channel sound (as opposed to the 3-
channel sound in this version). Didn't the disk units have the
same TI sound chip? Am I having a dream thinking it wouldn't be
too hard to run CP/M on this?
Any one has any appropriate technical documents for the MTX?
Petteri Jantti, pjx@ichaos.nullnet.fi
MONTE DAVIDOFF
-------------------------------------------------
Whatever happened to Monte Davidoff, the third member of the
triumvirate that developed Altair BASIC for MITS? Davidoff was a
classmate of Bill Gates at Harvard and he wrote the floating-
point math routines for the BASIC interpreter that was sold for
the MITS Altair 8800 computer.
richard66@aol.com
OSBORNE ONE
-------------------------------------------------
I have recently purchased an original Osborne 1 computer. I have
no boot disk and am currently looking for one. This computer
came with no book of any kind. If you have any info or know of
an archive I can get some software from it would be appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
Todd Walsh, icswalsh@world.std.com
PDP-10
-------------------------------------------------
I am interested in corresponding with anyone out there who has
had personal experience with the PDP-10, either using TOPS-10 or
TENEX. Reply to me by e-mail....or by Ma Bell (202) 357-2828.
Anyone know where I could look at or obtain TOPS-10 or TENEX
manuals? Xeroxes would be OK; I'll even do the Xeroxing myself.
Paul Ceruzzi
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 48
PDP-11/03-L
-------------------------------------------------
I just rescued a pair of PDP11/03-Ls from Certain Doom. My next
question is the obvious, "Now what?" Does anyone have any info
on these? I would like to get them working and set up, but I
don't know anything about them. Any information or pointers to
information would be greatly appreciated, as would any manuals
anyone could find...
As for the machines themselves, they each have a CPU unit, a
dual 8" floppy drive, and two (5M?) disk packs which I can't seem
to get open. Under the CPU unit is another weird unit with a
whole bunch of DB25 (serial?) connectors growing out of it. Is
this for terminals? That's my guess, because the machine doesn't
seem to have a designated "console".
The person I got them from didn't have a lot of information, but
said they run RSTS.
Any info on how to get these beasts to boot, or where to get
software for them, would be greatly appreciated!
Mark D. Roth, roth@uiuc.edu
PDP-11/60
-------------------------------------------------
I'd love to correspond with people who used the PDP 11/60,
RSTS/E, RT-11 or who own and use a DECmate. Those where the
days!
David Moisan, N1KGH
86 Essex St. Apt #204
Salem. MA 01970-5225
MicroPDP-11
-------------------------------------------------
If anyone has a M7555 (RQDX3), M8639-YA (RQDX1), or M8639-YB
(RQDX2) QBus module that needs a good home, I have a MicroPDP-11
that could sure use it. I need a card to control the RX50 and
RD52 in order to get it back in working order.
While I'm at it...If anyone has a MicroPDP-11 back panel (I have
no idea what these look like) please let me know. The MicroPDP I
have seems to have been de-installed by ripping the back panel
off and snipping all the serial lines. The back panel is nowhere
to be found.
Any and all help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 49
Seth J. Morabito, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY;
sjm1@cornell.edu
PERTEC
-------------------------------------------------
I am looking for the address or phone number of Pertec Computer
Corp. or any info about them. They were located in Los Angeles,
CA, in the 1980's. They bought the MITS company that made the
Altair microcomputer, but I can't find Pertec now.
Did someone buy them out? or did they go bankrupt?
Can anyone provide any leads? Thanks very much.
Mark Greenia, Lexikon Services
ROCKWELL AIM-65
-------------------------------------------------
Amongst my array of archaic computers I have 2 Rockwell AIM-65
single board computers (one with FORTH ROMs!). I really never did
anything with these beasts because I have no peripherals for
them etc. what other accessories were out for this "toy"? Is
there any way I can connect a terminal to it so I no longer have
that miserable 24-character bubble LED readout?
Does anyone have any AIM trivia/folklore etc.?
Jonathan Disegi
SHARP BUBBLE MEMORIES
-------------------------------------------------
I still have a Sharp portable sitting in the attic, which uses
bubble memories for storage. The bubble memories are contained
in a small blue metal case, with a 30-pin card-edge (female)
connector and a small reflective patch on the side, which you
can cover with a piece of masking tape to make it read-only. The
type number of these is CE-100BF. Does anyone know more about
these memory modules, or the portable that uses them? I think it
came with MS-DOS 2.11 in ROM.
Marcel Melters, mac@mcc.iaehv.nl
SILICON VALLEY HISTORY
-------------------------------------------------
I'm interested in what factors led to the development of Silicon
Valley as we know it today. Some factors would be the close
proximity of Stanford, the early location there of high tech
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 50
companies like HP, etc. Eventually there was a landslide of co-
location. Did the government of California play any role in the
development? Do folks consider "America's Technology Highway"
(Rte. 128) near MIT to be comparable in scope and/or origins?
If people could help me out by pointing out any books, articles,
etc. or opinions on the subject I'd appreciate it. I'd also
appreciate any suggestions about a better place to post or ask
these questions.
Thanks very much,
Steve, squeegee@cris.com
SONY NeWS-STATION
-------------------------------------------------
Some days ago I bought one old Sony NetStation (NEWS-1850). This
machine works fine for me, but I'm becoming tired of recompiling
all the stuff that I find useful on newer Un*xes, so some
questions raised:
1) Are there any archives on the net holding software
and information about these machines?
2) Are there any mailing-lists and/or newsgroups related
to Sony's?
Any hints welcomed.
Guido Thater, gt@sky.gun.de
STAR TREK (THE GAME)
-------------------------------------------------
I'm looking for sources (FORTRAN or C) to a version of the
classic "Star Trek" written at the University of Texas. I played
it in 1982 or so on their CDC mainframe, and I've seen it on a
VAX as well.... Mail or posts will be welcome.
Thanks,
Doug McNaught, Towson State University
TI PROGRAMMABLE TERMINAL
-------------------------------------------------
Anyone remember a programmable terminal that TI marketed around
1974 or so? It had dual cassette drives and a rather powerful
(but syntactically simple) programming language that allowed it
to do just about anything you could ask of a small computer of
the era.
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 51
I contracted with a small outfit that intended to sell these as
general purpose computers to do some programming -- I think the
only other programmer they had was a smart 12-year-old, which
should have told me something.
Anyway, I had contracted to write a text formatter, which I did,
but they seemed to be on such tenuous financial ground that I
bailed out of the project before I had it all debugged. Just as
well, as real desktop computers with useful software were just
around the corner. (Still, I should have rewritten that
formatter for CP/M and made, oh, about $500 in royalties...;-) )
Anyone remember this box? And did anyone else write any code for
it?
Michael J. Edelman
TRS-80 MODEL 4
-------------------------------------------------
A friend of mine needs a boot disk for a TRS-80 Model 4
computer. If you have one and would like to help out please
contact me via private EMail. If you have any other software
laying around for the TRS-80 please also contact me, so I can
relay it to him. Thanks...
xeno@clark.net
TX-0 AND PDP-1
-------------------------------------------------
Can anyone out there give me a list (and description) of the
instruction set of either (or both) the TX-0 and the PDP-1. I
believe there are some similarities since the PDP-1 incorporated
some of the TX-0's features when it was designed. I have DEC's
book "Digital at Work" which gives a basic summary of both
machines, but I would like MUCH more detail if possible. Anyone
who knows anything about either of these machines, or who can
point me to a FAQ will be much appreciated. Thanks!
Don Congdon
VICTOR VI
-------------------------------------------------
Where can I get a short history of the Commodore/Sirius/Victor
lineage? My Victor VI is a jump-wired nightmare. A friend who
worked for Victor (in Scotts Valley, California) tells me that
at one point, they had a 50% out-of-the-box failure rate!
Kenneth Freeman, San Diego, CA
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 52
WANG LAPTOPS
-------------------------------------------------
I have come across a couple of ancient Wang laptop computers,
V30 IBM compatibles with 10 meg hard drives and built-in
printers.
Questions
1. One has a dead hard drive. It is a SCSI. Does the Wang laptop
use a standard SCSI drive?
2. They have an external port to connect a floppy drive. it
appears to be SCSI also. But it said I had a block size error
when I tried to connect my Seagate drive to it. And when I
connected the floppy to my ST-02 controller on my XT, it ignored
it.
Where can I find drivers...
Maxwell Froedge
XEROX 1108
-------------------------------------------------
I just bought a < working Xerox 1108 Lisp
workstation. However, I was not given instructions on how to
boot the system...I held down both the Reset and Alt keys on the
front panel, and I heard some hard disk activity for a minute,
but then the numeric LED display started flashing 0201 -- what
does this mean? Is it an error? Plus, when I turn the computer
on, the screen is completely blank -- does it stay this way until
it is booted?
I am desperate to get this thing running...thanks a lot!
Jonathan Disegi
-------------------------------------------------
ARTICLES NOTED
-------------------------------------------------
"Practicing Safe Software," Billy Goodman, _Air & Space
Smithsonian_, September 1994, p. 60ff. Behind-the-scenes of
Apollo mission software development and debugging, with
attention to the careers of John Norton, Margaret Hamilton and
John Garman.
"ASAP Legends: Douglas Engelbart," Owen Edwards, _Forbes ASAP_,
October 10, 1994, pp. 130-1. A brief appreciation of the
inventor of the mouse and much else. Good photo.
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 53
"Unix at 25," Peter H. Salus, _Byte_, October 1994, pp. 75ff. A
rich and anecdotal history of Unix from Multics to Mach and
beyond; derived from Salus' new book, _A Quarter-Century of
UNIX_ (Addison-Wesley)
"Unforgettable Grace Hopper," J. A. N. Lee, _Readers' Digest_,
October 1994, pp. 181ff. A summary of the Admiral's long and
varied career, including folkloric detail like the famous
nanosecond wire.
-------------------------------------------------
PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED
-------------------------------------------------
[Omissions are inadvertent and regretted; we're still getting
snail-mail by the bagful from our old address.]
_An Annotated Bibliography of the History of Data Processing_.
James W. Cortada; Greenwood Press, Westport CT, 1983. 215 pp.
From Kevin Frank.
"A Brief History of the Rice Computer, 1959-1971." Adam Thornton
and Joel Cyprus. Draft, 35 pp. A history of the computer built
at the Rice Institute (later Rice University) in the late 1950's
to provide computing power comparable to Los Alamos' MANIAC II.
From Adam Thornton.
Charles Babbage Institute NEWSLETTER, Volume 16 Number 4, Summer
1994. New CBI director Bob Seidel; Griswold papers; Tomash
Fellowship; INRIA conference; Fortieth anniversary of NORC;
more. 8 pp. From Judy O'Neill.
_IICS Chapter Notes_, newsletter of the International
Interactive Communications Society. April 1994; July 1994, 12
pp. News and calendars of San Francisco Bay Area activity in
multimedia. From Sheila Farrell.
_The Mathematical Intelligencer_, Volume 16 Number 3, Summer
1994. Articles on the history and culture of mathematics. US$39
or equivalent per year (four issues). From Chandler Davis,
University of Toronto.
_The Z-Letter_, newsletter of the CP/M and Z-System community.
Number 32, July/August 1994. Kildall obituary; Pascal programs;
Echelon; new 22DISK; Software testing; correspondence, resources
and technical discussion. 22 pp. US$18 for 12 issues (2 years);
Canada/Mexico, US$22; International, US$36. From David A. J.
McGlone.
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 54
-------------------------------------------------
ADDRESSES OF CORRESPONDING ORGANIZATIONS
-------------------------------------------------
Charles Babbage Institute, 103 Walter Library, 117 Pleasant
Street SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455. Judy E. O'Neill, associate
director.
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. CompuServe 100116,217. David A. Greelish, director and
editor.
International Association of Calculator Collectors, 10445
Victoria Avenue, Riverside CA 92503. Guy Ball, Bruce L. Flamm,
directors.
International Interactive Communications Society, 2601 Mariposa
Street, San Francisco CA 94110. Sheila Farrell, membership
secretary.
Lambda Software Publishing, 149 West Hilliard Lane, Eugene OR
97404. David A. J. McGlone, editor and publisher.
_The Mathematical Intelligencer_, Springer-Verlag New York, 175
Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Chandler Davis, editor-in-
chief.
Unusual Systems, 220 Samuel Street, Kitchener, Ontario N2H 1R6,
Canada. Kevin Stumpf, president.
-------------------------------------------------
THANKS TO....
-------------------------------------------------
Aaron Alpar, Joann Green, Bill Matison of Extra Storage, Frank
McConnell, and Mercury Moving for Mini Rescue II.
Allen Baum for a shoeboxful of wonderful docs including CDC
6600, DEC PDP-8, Fairchild MSI, HP 2100, IBM 1620 and
System/360, Motorola 6800, TENET, Varian 520/i, 620/i and
620/L.... (All in a shoebox! Really!)
Leigh Buchanan for our concise but comprehensive appearance in
_CIO_.
Phyllis Cangemi for her donation.
Robin Donald for early _PC Magazines_ including Volume I, Number
1.
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 55
Kevin Frank for the Cortada bibliography, plucked out of a
university library discard pile. Eternal vigilance....
Jon Herron at AE Press for his usual nice job on the ENGINE, and
in a hurry!
Gail Lee for first-class coordination and taping of the _Osgood
File_ episode.
Jim Lundy and Doug Abramson of Worldspan L. P. for trying to get
your Managing Editor a ticket to London in time for the
Bletchley Park dedication. If it hadn't been World Cup summer!
Frank McConnell (again) for purchasing, donating, _and storing_
our new, potent and classy Altos mini.
Tony Napolitan, Henry Lowood and Robin Rider for working
lunches.
Bill von Hagen for his donation.
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NEXT ISSUE
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Oh, well! Presumably _some_ of the seventeen people who've
promised to write articles will come through by January! These
are just the details that make an editor's life so interesting!
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GUIDELINES FOR DISTRIBUTION
-------------------------------------------------
The ANALYTICAL ENGINE is intellectual shareware. Distribution of
_complete, verbatim_ copies through online posting, Internet
mail or news, fax, postal service or photocopying is encouraged
by the Computer History Association of California.
Excerpting or brief quotation for fair use, including review or
example, is also permitted, with one exception: Any material
copyright to or by a third party and reprinted in the ANALYTICAL
ENGINE by permission shall not be used in another periodical or
context, unless the permission of the copyright holder is
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Alterations, abridgments or hacks of the ANALYTICAL ENGINE which
change the intent or meaning of original content; or which
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contrive to injure the Computer History Association of
California, its officers, contributors, volunteers or members;
are PROHIBITED. Reproduction of the ANALYTICAL ENGINE without
its subscription coupon is abridgment in this sense.
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 56
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GUIDELINES FOR SUBMISSION
-------------------------------------------------
The ANALYTICAL ENGINE solicits manuscripts of 750 to 2500 words
on the general topic of the history of computing in, or with
significant reference to, the State of California. Articles
should focus on one interesting or illuminating episode and
should be written for a technically literate general audience.
Submissions are welcome from both members and non-members of the
CHAC. Article deadlines are the fifteenth of each month prior to
publication: June 15 for the July issue, September 15 for the
October issue, December 15 for the January issue, and March 15
for the April issue.
Each author may publish a maximum of one signed article per
year. This restriction does not apply to letters, queries or
interviews. Thank you for cooperating to protect diversity of
voices and topics. Previously published material will be
republished only in clearly attributed quotations or citations;
or when its publication in the ANALYTICAL ENGINE will bring it
to the attention of a significantly broader audience; or when
the original publication is materially obsolete or inaccessible.
Decision of the editors is final but copyright of all published
material will remain with the author.
The preferred document file format is Microsoft Word for DOS or
Windows, but almost any DOS or Macintosh word processor file
will be acceptable. Submit manuscripts on DOS 5.25" or 3.5", or
Mac HD (1.4) diskettes. Alternatively, please send your article
as ASCII or ISO Internet mail. Please avoid submitting on paper
unless absolutely necessary.
-------------------------------------------------
ETERNAL VIGILANCE....
-------------------------------------------------
Always remember that, if you're expecting an ANALYTICAL ENGINE
and you don't get one, we want to know about it. Pronto.
During the rest of this year we'll be working to make e-mail
delivery more robust; and it does seem that the USPS has finally
learned to treat the paper ENGINE with appropriate respect.
Still, two subscribers that we know of never received the July
ENGINE that was originally sent.
If you're supposed to get an ENGINE and you don't, _complain_.
We'll send you another one.
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 57
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A BALLOT
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[Ordinarily, ballots for the National Computing Science Day
survey are confidential. But we asked Tim Patterson, career
database hacker and humorist from Berkeley, for permission to
print his.]
"Free propeller beanies for every man, woman and child in
the United States and all its colonies, formal and informal.
Requirement that on National Computing Science Day, all
members of Congress speak only in machine language.
Mandatory 10% raise every year for all clerical and
maufacturing employees in Silicon Valley."
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NINES-CARD
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PRINTER, SPARE THAT TREE!
(a college CS story from James M. Putnam, Silicon Graphics
International)
In 1974 I was working in the computer center of St. Andrews
Presbyterian College, Laurinburg, NC, which had an RJE card
reader/printer connected to Triangle Universities Computation
Center's twinned 370/168s. I had figured out how to up the CPU
and page limits for PL/C (a PL/1 student load-and-go compiler)
jobs. I was running a Monte Carlo simulation, and the numbers
from the random function didn't look very random, so I thought
I'd print out every hundredth one just to eyeball them. The
simulation was trying to approximate PI with Buffon's Needle
method, and I kept getting told that PI was 3.0, or some damn
thing. Somehow, in the next run, I misplaced a page feed
statement in the outer loop, and since the simulation ran a
million iterations, the program then tried to print out ten
thousand pages, each with a single ten digit random number in
the upper left-hand corner.
This shouldn't have been so bad. If the college operator were
paying even the slightest attention, he would have stopped the
job after the first half-box or so of paper. At some point even
my expanded page limit would have shut it down. Unfortunately,
the operator on duty was Earl, one of my closer friends, for
whom intoxication from various sources was all but irresistible.
Working in the campus computer center didn't require much in the
way of higher brain function, so Earl tended to get a little
tanked before his shift.
Over in the keypunch room, I was listening to the printer.
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 58
Something seemed wrong, but I couldn't figure out just what it
was. It wasn't until I wandered into the computer room, in time
to see Earl load a fourth box of greenbar paper, that it hit me.
I slapped the power switch on the printer, and rang up the TUCC
operator to cancel the job, and stood there meekly while he
called me, among other things, an idiot.
Earl allowed, "You know, I was wondering when that thing was
gonna quit. I was hoping we weren't gonna run out of paper. What
were you going to do with all that stuff?" I admitted that I had
made a teensy error in judgement, and told him that if he ever
saw anything like that again, he was to gun the job first and
ask questions later. "Fine", says Earl, "but what do we do with
all this paper?". I admitted I didn't know, but suggested that
he just put it out with the other used paper.
It's funny, but for six months after that, I kept finding those
sheets of paper _everywhere_, in my room, in the cafeteria, at
the radio station. The only thing I can think of is that Earl
found a use for it after all.
The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 59
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ADD MONEY, MAIL....
-------------------------------------------------
and enjoy fascinating articles, letters, queries and editorials
while you support the study and preservation of California's
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____ Yes! Please enroll me in the Computer History Association
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The Analytical Engine, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1994 Page 60
National Computing Science Day PRELIMINARY BALLOT
____ I vote FOR the Federal proclamation of a National Computing
Science Day.
____ I vote AGAINST the Federal proclamation of a National
Computing Science Day.
____ I think a National Computing Science Day, if proclaimed,
should implement the following features; and/or these are my
reasons for my vote (optional):
_____________________________________________________
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