The BH reminded me that NASA once had a Very High Temperature Wind Tunnel fuelled by Very Very Expensive Gases. It ran for a few years without a worry. One year a memory burp in the SCADA system caused it to issue a command to an empty I/O channel. The SCADA computer immediately halted. The tunnel continued to burn Very Very Expensive Gases for about 1 minute 30 seconds before the mechanical fail safe shut it down from overheating.
The post mortem discovered it was a design feature not an error that the SCADA system halted when a command was issued to an empty I/O channel since in theory it might not have been empty but the peripheral could have been damaged or been turned off. Some of us thought an error message would have been better and the custom OS was coded to expect such faults, but who were we to judge the hardware designers? In those days the hardware people were the lords and the software types the serfs.
As it was, the salesman would have been delighted to take an order for whatever should have been connected (and was just on a different channel), and wisdom of the time figured the SCADA system would have waited for delivery and installation and then exited the halt.
CDC wasn’t my staple diet at the time, just chanced this one, but 300 MB was luxury at the time! The disk packs I was changing were much smaller … RM03 was 60-something megabytes but most of our PDP’s had 3 or 4 of them, so heaps of storage
So long ago. My memory was the ones on the mainframes were badges. Were they?
My toys in the CDC era included 6600, 7600, c74, 173, 175, 176, and 205s.
I long since jettisoned the memorabilia that included cordwood and core memory modules. An era later (post CDC times) I had some vector CPUs and SSRAM main memory modules collecting dust, originally USD300,000 that finally went to the recycler for $19.20. The relevant museums had representative bits already and nowhere else to store more so knocked them back.
One facility I spent a few years at (~1980) had 45GB of ‘slow disks’ (3MBps spec) and 4.5GB of the fastest on the planet at the time (CDC 819/829, 4.5MBps) when the overwhelming majority of ’ very powerful’ computers still had rooms of spinning 1600/6250 tapes. Roughly USD45 million worth after discounts. I had some crashed 819 platters for a while but the missus coerced me to put them out for the rubbish - where they were taken by a discerning passer-by within an hour.
I don’t know how one could throw such treasures out !! I was leafing through a slightly dated EA magazine only yesterday … things have come a long way!
The cover reminded me of an early supercomputer conference in Netherlands - maybe 1986? Utrecht from memory. It was the first supercomputer show/exhibition for NEC and Fujitsu and they had no idea, but knew about car shows.
Each of them had organised a team of local models, each taught a demo script, and NEC also contracted a recently ‘retired’ EU female rock star to headline. I was told she was very well known across the EU and her audience included many from the music press. She read a techie talk from a lectern. The general reception was a mix between smirks, giggles, eye rolling, and [trying to] engage them in tech talk just because. They were banned from fraternising
And we are remote connected to the network from home!. At 300 BAUD (at minimum 300 bits per second, but could be more than that depending on modulation technique). After lots of beeps and chirps. Early eighties this would be.
This poor old IBM lives on in my bookcase ‘in bits’ … a relic of the days when if you could justify/afford a computer then the space it took and the heat it generated simply weren’t an issue. I haven’t looked up these cards, but I suspect they come from the 370/115 I referenced in an earlier post. I found the old 8" floppy drive it used recently … the whole assembly is bigger than most desktops these days.
The worst engineering decision ‘we’ made was in 1976 when the 8080 was still Very Expensive - over $100 - so we went with discrete logic that was but a fraction of cost. By the time the product was ready to go in 1978 the 8080 price had dropped to $10.
The bad news was the product was unique and literally the only one that fully met the relevant Underwriters Laboratory security standard at the ‘AAA’ (highest) level so the standard was lowered to accommodate other companies. Since they were using Intel chips theirs were cheaper and ours went into oblivion because of cost. The good news was the product was so good vendors in the specialist industry bought all the prototypes at an obscene price that paid for the project. Even though there were now multiple products rated ‘AAA’ ours was obviously better to those who really cared but most just needed to have the ‘AAA’ box ticked for procurement purposes.
Yep, that does sound dumb.
In 1976 the micro wars were in full flight and competition was forcing prices down.
Zilog Z80, Motorola 6800, MOS 6502 all competed with the 8080.
but most of our PDP’s had 3 or 4 of them, so heaps of storage 
I was leafing through a slightly dated EA magazine only yesterday … things have come a long way!
