B800 vs B1800, etc

From: Hans B PUFAL <hansp_at_citem.org>
Date: Sun Jul 25 04:25:05 2004

Steve Wilson wrote:

> There were two separate operating systems available for the B1000
> series. There was the standard MCP (that was similar in operational
> characteristics between the B1000 and B2000 series at least) It didn't
> have a common code base, but things worked in a similar manner from the
> console (SPO in Burroughs speak.)

The big mainframes B5000, B6000 and B7000 also used the same MCP
technology, indeed it was created for the B5500

> The other OS was "CMS" and ran on the B800/B1000 series. CMS was from
> the Liege plant if I recall (Hans - is this right??) and I remember them
> showing up in Santa Barbara where we were bringing up the B1965 at the
> time. We had our MCP up with a couple of issues when the guys came in
> from Liege to bring up CMS. It had one issue which was a new
> instruction we'd added on the B1965 if I remember, other than that it
> came right up! So from my understanding you could run the same
> applications on the B1000 and B800 series.

CMS is my baby ;-) It was a joint development between Downing town
(B700/800/900) , Cumbernauld (B80/90) and Liege (B1000) The idea was to
use the interpreter structure developed for the B1700 language
implementations to define an "S-machine" layer to which all compilers
generated code. Of course we could not use the B1700 S-machines
directly, we had to design our own ;-) Those binaries were then
executable on any system which implemented the S-machines. There was a
separate interpreter for each language. The MCP was microcoded for each
architecture though most utilities and all compilers were written in a
high level language (MPL?) and were thus portable across all architectures.

This was probably the first time a set of languages were implemented
across vastly differing architectures using byte-code interpreters. Java
before its time ;-)

Regarding the questions on B800/B900 from a previous message, they were
different beasties. The B800 was a development of the B700 architecture.
The B900 was a multiprocessor system based on the BDS processor
developed for the B80 in Cumbernauld. The B900 could have up to 8
processors. Some were dedicated to specific system tasks others were
available for user programs. I recall many discussions on performance
when Downing town said they could just add processors to speed up the
workload, but many programs including compilers always took the same
amount of time because they could not take advantage of the multiple
processors.

> I had ALOT of fun working on the machine, and learned alot too!

Which goes for all the big B machines I worked on ;-)

   -- HansP
Received on Sun Jul 25 2004 - 04:25:05 BST