KL power question

From: Eric Smith <eric_at_brouhaha.com>
Date: Tue Feb 2 14:15:33 1999

> Hmm. Toad has an UPS. This provokes a question: Did KLs (Or any -10)
> have UPSes?

Not as a part of the KL. Some installations used a motor-generator (with
a *MASSIVE* flywheel).

The KL had power-fail restart as a standard feature. The big capacitors
in the power supply would power it for about 200 ms (if memory serves).
The power-fail interrupt would tell the OS to write the CPU status to
core, so that when power was restored it could be restarted from where it
left off.

Later KL systems had semiconductor memory instead of core, so they had
battery backup for the RAM. But the principle remains the same.

> Did TOPS know how to talk to an UPS, or is this an XKL hack?

It's almost certainly an XKL hack.

> I bet it would be one hell of an UPS to run all that ECL...

You didn't want to be anywhere nearby if the flywheel became unbalanced.
Received on Tue Feb 02 1999 - 14:15:33 GMT