Gabe Goldberg wrote: > http://www.livingcomputermuseum.org/ -- fascinating, check it out. Not a > stuffy warehouse with techno-artifacts, a laboratory for reincarnating > running systems!
I see they have a bunch of PDP-10s and descendants... cool. That was the first "real" system I liked interacting with, back in 1972. 'tis a pity they don't have an ancient Burroughs B6700... that would be impressive. (I managed to scrounge up a field engineer's handbook for the B6700 & MCP... and, being a multi-processor with eight ports on the memory bus, had an instruction named "Interrupt Other Processors". The mnemonic for this instruction, BTW, being "HEYU".) But I first saw (and worked with) the Xerox Sigma-9 (and -7) at Dun & Bradstreet in the mid-1970s and I was impressed w/ the system and its instruction set (I *have* toggled programs into an idle -9) and its use of a meta-assembler (I got a lot more practice with meta-assemblers on the Sperry-UNIVAC 1100 series, especially when writing microcode for the DataWest Array Processor) but, have worked in operations, found the shutdown activity for CP-V (the console operator "ZAP" command) would, on the model 35 TTY used as the console, would print "THAT'S ALL FOLKS" (with some entertaining mechanical noises) while playing the Star-Spangled Banner. I did time-- at college-- with IBM S/360s and 370s and even used an RCA Spectra-70/46, too. I spent a good number of years working with the Sperry-UNIVAC 1100 series (the /80 and /60, including a lot of time doing performance analysis, for which OSAM was handy) and wrote a full-screen editor (FSED) that worked on the Uniscope-200 and UTS-400 variety terminals and was fairly used to Exec-8 (as it was named at the time). "Why, when I was your age, we didn't have none of these fancy graphics you kids have these days, naw, if we wanted to see pretty pictures, we ran out job output to the card punch and held 'em up to the light!" And, yeah, I remember the tapes of over-print pictures in IBM's 132+ASA column print format (heck, one of my tasks at SIAC was to write a translator for Exec-8 SDFF print files to be output to the 132+ASA character format). "The good old days weren't always good, tomorrow ain't as bad as it seems!" As for the micro-computers, specifically the S-100 variety: the Polymorphic systems Poly-88 was the first one I dealt with that actually had an interrupt system. AFAICR the Imsai and Altair required a specific extra board to allow it to handle interrupts. (sighs_ I am *sooooooo* old. Q: "John, how's the Unix project coming along?" A: (falsetto) "Oh, it's fine!" -soup -- John R. Campbell Speaker to Machines souperb at gmail dot com MacOS X proved it was easier to make Unix user-friendly than to fix Windows ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For more information on Linux on System z, visit http://wiki.linuxvm.org/
