On Wed, 30 Dec 2009 21:35:12 -0500, Shmuel Metz wrote: >In <listserv%[email protected]>, on 12/30/2009 > at 01:26 PM, Tom Marchant <[email protected]> said: > >>There was also a bid from Burroughs, > >I believe that Wayne had some other issues with Burroughs. Wasn't there a >B1700 system that they were less than pleased with?
Yes. It was the $250,000 minicomputer that I alluded to in my previous post. The university bought the B1726 to replace some old manual checkwriting machines, which were used for accounts payable. The old machines created a paper tape that was converted into punched cards to feed into the accounting system. The new system was to interface directly with the accounting system on the mainframe. The machine that we had was equipped with only 64K of memory and it performed badly because of that. Very badly. We had reason to believe that it wouldn't perform from the beginning, but were told to continue with development and to document our findings. We also went to Burroughs HQ on several occasions to test on a machine with 512K of memory and everything performed quite acceptably. When we finally demonstrated the system, we entered a batch of one check, balanced it, proofed it, lined the check up in the printer and couldn't go any farther because the system was not able to find a large enough area of free memory to bring in the next page that was needed. To get to that point took a full hour. Part of the reason for the paging problem was that the architecture did not have a fixed page size. It was a bit-oriented machine and memory could be allocated to the bit, without any regard for byte boundaries. Even the instruction counter was a variable size, depending on the memory requirements of the program. Depending on the size of the program, the page size could be any power of 2 -- 4K, 1K, 8K, 256 bytes, etc. It made finding an available page a difficult task, especially on a machine that was memory constrained. They ended up scrapping the project and buying four Datapoint microcomputers for $12,000 each -- Tom Marchant ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
