Computer collecting humor.

From: William Donzelli <william_at_ans.net>
Date: Wed Nov 5 11:27:15 1997

> I have at home a memory bank from a CDC Cyber two-hundred-and-something
> (?) which is 18 bits wide. I had always assumed that this was 16 bits
> plus two parity but it doesn't fit into 60 bits either way. (Memory
> bank is huge quantities of 40ns and 45ns 64k x 1 static RAMs surface
> mounted on both sides of numerous daughter boards. Each daughter board
> is 64k x 18 and they stack four deep all over the "mother board" of the
> bank.) I always meant to use this in something, but somehow I never got
> around to it...

That is perhaps from one of the Cyber 203/205/215 supercomputers. These
were HUGE vector machines, from the same period (and a rival of) the later
Cray-1s. They were 60 bit machines, so I am confused about the x18
organization. Perhaps error checking was involved.

You really do not want to do anything with it - CDC made very few of the
beasts and your memory bank is a real gem of an artifact.

William Donzelli
william_at_ans.net
Received on Wed Nov 05 1997 - 11:27:15 GMT