Pulled off alt.foklore.computers:
Interdata History - From: Will Jennings <XDS_Sigma7_at_hotmail.com>
Fri Jun 9 14:42:19 2000
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Subject: Interdata, Perkin-Elmer, et al.
OK, a brief history of Interdata, etc.;
Interdata was founded in about 1967 in Oceanport, NJ, and the majority
of the funding was put up by the local jockey club because they wanted
to grow Oceanport into a more high-tech area. This would later cause
them some problems, i.e. I heard a story about how AT&T was going to
buy a large quantity of Interdata machines, then looked into the
background of the company, saw that the Oceanport Jockey Club was the
main stockholder, and cancelled the deal. Afterwards, they
redistributed the stock so that say John Doe was a stockholder, and he
just *happened* to belong to the jockey club (told to me by a former
Interdata employee). Anyway, the Interdata machines use the IBM S/360
instruction set, and most programs written in S/360 assembler will run
unmodified on an Interdata, provided that they don't use floating point
(S/360 floating point is ODD!), and are not dependent on a certain IBM
device being present, i.e. a program that had routines specifically for
use with a 7320 in it would not work. The assembler is even called CAL
(Common Assembly Language) whereas the S/360 assembler is called BAL
(Basic Assembly Language). Interdata also used the weird IBm terms,
i.e. SELCH, MUX, IPL, MTM, etc. In fact, on the later machines, the
racks are even IBM blue. I could talk about all the Interdata models
but I don't want to flood the list, so I'll keep it to their most
significant model, the 7/32. The 7/32 was the world's first 32-bit
minicomputer, introduced in 1973. The 7/32 is also significant in that
it has a cycle of either 750 or 1000ns, depending on the core, and it
can have up to one megabyte of memory. Not to mention the fact that it
has a full display panel, which is even more impressive with the
hexidecimal option. Anyway, Perkin-Elmer bought Interdata in about
1975, and continued to market and develop the products but with the P-E
name on them. The first machine that P-E sold without it being a
rebadged Interdata was the 3220 (1978), which looks a lot like the 30xx
series of machines from IBM. The 3200 series machines are backward
compatible with the two Interdata 32 bit machines, the 7/32 and 8/32.
In 1979, P-E released the 3210, which is twice as fast as a VAX 11/780,
and it fits in a normal size rack instead of a massive unwieldy thing.
In 1985, P-E spun off the computer division as Concurrent Computer
Corporation, who is still in business (
http://www.ccur.com). Concurrent
also bought Masscomp in about 1989 or so, and still makes machines
based around Masscomp's RTU operating system. All of the Interdata/P-
E/Concurrent hardware is specifically designed for real-time
applications, and as such, is less well-known then companies like DEC
who made general-purpose machines. If anyone is interested, I'll make
an Interdate/P-E/Concurrent web page. I personally own 2 Interdata
7/32's, 2 P-E 3203's, a P-E 3205, and 3 P-E 3210's. I wouldn't mind
more either... or a Masscomp.. heh
Will J (From: Will Jennings <XDS_Sigma7_at_hotmail.com>)
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Received on Tue Apr 17 2001 - 09:59:44 BST