TDC1007 / 1007 / TRW / Rare TRW Processor ?

From: Paul Koning <pkoning_at_equallogic.com>
Date: Wed Apr 21 08:34:41 2004

>>>>> "John" == John Lawson <jpl15_at_panix.com> writes:

 John> Remembering that this is circa 1978/9 - some specs listed:

 John> "AT a 19.3 kHtz sampling rate it will implement, for example,
 John> 24 simple oscillators, or 16 oscillators with ramp envelope
 John> control, or 8 voices of frequency modulation, or 20 first-order
 John> filter sections, or 10 second-order filter sections, or 30
 John> white noise generators, or various combinations of the above,
 John> such as 12 oscillators and 4 voices of frequency modulation"

Interesting.

Something like that was built at the University of Illinois PLATO
project, but much lower cost -- 16 small boards (one per channel) and
some spare cycles on the 8080 in the terminal to control it. That one
was actually mostly analog, each channel having its own D/A and analog
volume control. We actually looked at the TRW multiplier approach for
a third generation with 128 channels but decided it was too expensive
other than as a lab curiosity, which wasn't the goal.

This was the "Gooch Cybernetic Synthesizer" by Sherwin Gooch, around
1976.

        paul
Received on Wed Apr 21 2004 - 08:34:41 BST