Upon the date 11:34 AM 2/2/99 -0800, ss_at_allegro.com said something like:
>Another thing to look for when searching for IBM 1130 information
>is the Meta 4.
Yes, little bits and pieces of info can be found referring to the 1130 and
1800 when checking the Meta 4 search hits. Anything to add to the 1130
information already pieced together. For example (and you non-German
readers out there please forgive me) here's a page telling of the coming
advancement of Meta 4 machines into Germany and France after the first
European installation in London:
http://www.computerwoche.de/archiv/1976/20/7620c018.html. The 400 1130 and
1800 systems will be replaced by them. That Computerwoche archive is a
great resource for news tidbits on older gear. Wish more American trade
journals would do this (HP Journal does this already, I think.)
>
>The Meta 4 (from Digital Scientific) was a clone of the
>IBM 1130, made in San Diego (ok, maybe Del Mar or Sorrento
In fact, the Computerwoche article above maintains it is San Diego. I've
seen San Diego in other Meta 4 references I've found like the one Stan
offers below.
>Valley area) around 1970. IIRC it was called an 1130 clone, but
>actually had the extra instruction(s) that would really make it an 1800
>clone.
>
>There's an article on it at:
> http://www.cowo.de/archiv/1976/15/7615c064.html
>
>It was this machine, at UCSD, that I wrote SPACEWAR on in
>1970, inspired by the article in Analog SF magazine. We had an
>Evans & Sutherland vector graphic display, and some kind of home
>brew sound (using Wavetek wave generators?). I still have a listing
>of the FORTRAN source for this SPACEWAR somewhere.
>I used the console switches as the controls, and had the usual
>gravity, hyperwarp (unreliable, of course...using it too often would
>get you killed). Someone added random twinkling stars at one point.
>We also had a computer-assisted targeting option for the second
>spaceship, which slowed things down but aided new players.
>
>I remember that the Meta 4 had firmware that was implemented on
>boards about 1 foot by 1 foot, with little copper squares of foil about
>the 1/4" by 1/4" ...indicating 1/0 by presence/absence. One problem
>was that the squares would sometimes lift up a bit, so we'd take out
>the boards and press them down again.
>
>I remember we also had APL, on a removable disk cartridge.
In the pages I've seen so far, the 1130 is said to have a max of 16KWord of
memory but my professors at school were bragging about our machine having
32K of memory (in 1972). Was there in fact an upgrade to 32K _words_ or
were they simply getting 32K bytes and 16K words confoozed? Remember, this
was all quite new to these older age professors then when few
backwater-area colleges our size even had a computer.
Regards, Chris
-- --
Christian Fandt, Electronic/Electrical Historian
Jamestown, NY USA cfandt_at_netsync.net
Member of Antique Wireless Association
URL:
http://www.ggw.org/freenet/a/awa/
Received on Tue Feb 02 1999 - 14:21:52 GMT