Intro msg: Teraks, emulators, reviving cassette data

From: Allison J Parent <allisonp_at_world.std.com>
Date: Mon Nov 24 23:09:52 1997

<Well there were -10s and then there were -10s. Ours consisted of 25 19"
<style rack cupboards next to each other (so it was about 40 odd feet in
<length). There were three racks for the CPU, four for memory (we had 256KW

That was a big ten! But compare it to a 9020(360/60) used by the FAA.
Or for that fact some of the -10s used by compuserve, they had some really
huge ones and not just a few. The biggest one inside DEC was the MARKET
cluster, yep four -10s clustered sharing the same disk field. But a lot of
10s were small 128kw, swapdrum, maybe four RP04s and an 8I or 8E for IO
control. The whole mess was two rows 24ft long. The CPU box alone for
the 360 next door was 4x the size of the KA10 cpu. that seems big but
a PDP-11 of that era would be 3-4 standard racks plus drives.

<There were plans for the so called Jupiter system which was due to ship

Jupiter was due to ship around '84 the 780 was sold in '78! The story is
this (I worked in the mill at the time) Jupiter was required to perform at
4x the last System10/20. The best the design team could accomplish was
2x (subtantial enough but below design goal). It was also competing for
resources(money) to design and build the 86xx (nautalus). What wasn't
known was the cutomer base was hungry for even 2x increase. The day it
was canceled was a very dark one for the engineering groups.

<Sitting at home I have all the necessary bits to put together an Apple II
<system to run UCSD Pascal. All I need is the time and the software (the on
<bit I don't have). The reason for wanting this is Carl Helmers Byte articl
<so many years ago describing such a system - for me the first microcompute
<that was usable rather than a "toy" to play with.

The appleII was more useful than most of the other non s100 systems like
trs-80s which didn't have solid hardware at that time(EI timing problems).
if you had a solid trs80 you could run UCSD psystem. I was running Psystem
on a Northstar horizon with three drives and it was a useful system.

Allison
Received on Mon Nov 24 1997 - 23:09:52 GMT