Computer collecting humor.

From: Philip.Belben_at_powertech.co.uk <(Philip.Belben_at_powertech.co.uk)>
Date: Wed Nov 5 12:00:42 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.

This one was thrown out by the Technical University of {better not say
where} in 1993. Not very old - date code on some of the memory chips is
1992.

My friend, a student there, whom I visited in August of that year, had
eight of these memory banks, eight megabytes each (64k x 2 bytes x four
boards deep x sixteen stacks per bank). I swapped him a Keithley 417k
electrometer (a very sensitive multimeter) for mine.

He also threw in a card from the CPU, which I think I've mentioned here
before. The technology is 100k series ECL so should have been faster
than Cray 1. (The Cray 1 in the {museum of same town} was 10k series.)
Received on Wed Nov 05 1997 - 12:00:42 GMT