First computer with real-time clock?

From: Paul Koning <pkoning_at_equallogic.com>
Date: Wed Aug 4 16:50:53 2004

>>>>> "Tom" == Tom Jennings <tomj_at_wps.com> writes:

 Tom> On Mon, 2004-08-02 at 13:05, Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
>> > (Wouldn't a hardware manual and/or programers manual help here?)
>>
>> Indeed. I've read through the Manual of Operation for the 650 and
>> it makes no mention or reference anywhere about any sort of timer
>> feature at all.

 Tom> But in the spirit of the times, does any hardware facility have
 Tom> any time-related side effect that could have been exploited to
 Tom> extract time from? (Besides the obvious calibrated-subroutine
 Tom> hack.) Or does the feature have to be explicitly a
 Tom> "time-keeping" hardware facility?

Either would serve. But a software mechanism would be really unlikely
in practice without something resembling a real OS, with an interrupt
mechanism or some other way to do things periodically (as on the CDC
6000 series).

As far as I can tell, the 650 had no such thing -- your application
was the only thing running. In theory you could keeep track of time
even though your code lives on a drum -- but in reality, how likely is
an application programmer, especially a business data processing
programmer, to want to deal with that kind of esoterica?

            paul
Received on Wed Aug 04 2004 - 16:50:53 BST