Re: [Simh] MIT MTC Docs
On 02/01/20 13:16, Al Kossow wrote: I will be putting a few of the Whirlwind magnetic tape images up on bitsavers later today. I've identified four which appear to be for the "Comprehensive System" used for non-military programming on tape drive 0. There is a utility program on drum band 11, which is kept read only which reads programs from tape 0. I also turned up a bit more in the documentation for the non-military paper tape numbering system. They used project/programmer numbering. Military tapes seem to be numbered as M or Mx xxx-xxx-xxx is project - programmer - number assigned by programmer for the paper tape They don't appear to follow that convention on the military project paper tapes. Being a Military/Naval historian (with an huge select mirror of the DTIC Archive..) I can suggest that M(x) can be the DoD contract number. Best regards from Italy, dott. Piergiorgio. ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
Re: [Simh] MIT MTC Docs
On 01/01/20 17:24, Al Kossow wrote: WW went through a couple of rebuilds, 1953/4 was the big one where they added the core memory and a lot of I/O devices. it's a spec whose alone put WW into SIMH's (and its CLI and scripting configurator) forte. Best regards from Italy, dott. Piergiorgio. ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
Re: [Simh] MIT MTC Docs
On 1/1/20 8:35 AM, Paul Koning wrote: KO has an interesting history with ferrite devices. One of the things DEC built early on were core memory testers Ken and Stan Olsen, Harlan Anderson, Ben Gurley, etc. all worked at Lincoln Labs in the 50s The other interesting thing I found out was that the Whirlwind used magnetic logic for core decoding that Ken invented. ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
Re: [Simh] MIT MTC Docs
> On Dec 31, 2019, at 7:39 PM, Phil Budne wrote: > > ... > Ken Olsen is supposed to have been the MTC designer, > his signature appears in > > http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/lincolnLaboratory/mtc/M-2134_MTC_Tests_on_Magnetic_Memory_May1953.pdf KO has an interesting history with ferrite devices. The one you mentioned is one. He did work on ferrite core logic devices, which is interesting stuff. And it appears he's the inventor of the core rope ROM memory used in the Apollo spacecraft. (At least the name "Olsen" appears in the documentation, so that would be him unless there was another Olsen at Lincoln Labs.) paul ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
Re: [Simh] MIT MTC Docs
On 12/31/19 4:39 PM, Phil Budne wrote: A few months ago I had spotted Whirlwind paper tape images on bitsavers, found one that looked like a binary, and figured out how to decode it into a 16-bit word, and started on a WWI simulation, but ran out of steam. https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-whirlwind-computer-at-chm/ https://computerhistory.org/blog/gambling-on-whirlwind-how-the-us-navy-spent-3-million-and-got-a-computer-game/ https://computerhistory.org/blog/jingle-bits-auditory-maintenance-whirlwind-holiday-songs-the-dawn-of-computer-music/ https://twitter.com/bitsavers/status/1202304085543702528 ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
Re: [Simh] MIT MTC Docs
On 31/12/19, Phil Budne wrote: > > I subscribe to an RSS feed for bitsavers, and saw things being added > here: > > http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/lincolnLaboratory/mtc/ > > Surprised to see there was an older file here. I never would have > looked for MTC files under Lincoln Labs since, I thought it was > a part of the Whirlwind project (built to test core memory for WW): > > Ken Olsen is supposed to have been the MTC designer, > his signature appears in > > http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/lincolnLaboratory/mtc/M-2134_MTC_Tests_on_Magnetic_Memory_May1953.pdf > > A few months ago I had spotted Whirlwind paper tape images on > bitsavers, found one that looked like a binary, and figured out how to > decode it into a 16-bit word, and started on a WWI simulation, but > ran out of steam. > > In any case, both WWI and MTC now seem like ripe targets for SimH! The MTC is also very interesting to me, specifically the instruction set design stages it went through. They had some quite diverging ideas for it. In the end it ended up very much like the WW1. In fact I've given a talk about the evolution from the WW1 to the PDP-6 three times this year [1] and wrote a simple WW1 emulator too [2]. I would definitely love to explore this whole topic a bit more! It's very interesting and exciting. Maybe I'll even make an FPGA whirlwind... aap [1] http://pdp-6.net/talks/wwtour_slides.pdf http://pdp-6.net/talks/wwtour_diagrams.pdf [2] https://github.com/aap/whirlwind/ ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
