First computer with real-time clock?

From: Paul Koning <pkoning_at_equallogic.com>
Date: Mon Aug 2 17:04:52 2004

>>>>> "Vintage" == Vintage Computer Festival <vcf_at_siconic.com> writes:

 Vintage> On Mon, 2 Aug 2004, Tom Jennings wrote:
>>
>> Are you looking exclusively at the IBM 650, or any computer? Does
>> it

 Vintage> The overall discussion is very useful, but in my particular
 Vintage> case, it needs to pertain specifically to the IBM 650,
 Vintage> because the assertion at hand is that a document used to
 Vintage> discredit a certain scientist's claim to a certain
 Vintage> achievement has a date stamp on it that is claimed was
 Vintage> produce by the IBM 650 using its internal clock feature.
 Vintage> The 650 does not have such a feature inherently, so now I'm
 Vintage> trying to determine if there was ever an adjunct product
 Vintage> that IBM produced to give the 650 the ability to tell time.

It sure doesn't look like that from the docs on Al Kossow's website.
It seems that the 650 doesn't have interrupts, which would make a
simple periodic tick type system pretty problematic.

If the exercise is to attach the credibility of the document, it looks
to me like you have enough data to do that. You can clearly say
"there isn't any such thing as an 'internal clock feature' on the
650". That puts the ball in the other party's court, to try to
demonstrate that there did exist some obscure add-on of which not a
word appears in the dozen or so IBM docs that are on-line.

And even then, another question becomes whether the time stamp is real
or a forgery, independent of what machine generated it.

     paul
Received on Mon Aug 02 2004 - 17:04:52 BST