Masscomp computers?

From: Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk_at_yahoo.co.uk>
Date: Wed Nov 24 06:47:36 2004

On Wed, 2004-11-24 at 07:25 -0500, Joe R. wrote:
> Does anyone on this list play with the Masscomp computers?

I'm the only person I've ever seen ask about them on here :)

They seem to be pretty much unknown. I haven't found the keyboard/mouse
yet for the one at the museum, so seeing what state it's in is a long
term project at present! It's also missing a castor, but that's the
least of the problems ;)


Andrew K. Bressen replied to me with the following info:

///
Masscomp did indeed make multi-cpu machines,
and also had an os called RTU (Real Time Unix).
They also had another unix called, I think, OS/32.
I don't know which one was used by the multiprocessor boxes.
I think the CPUs were mostly 68k's,
system bus might have been multibus.

They had early successes as graphics/cad workstations,
so yes they had mice. Masscomp was bought by Concurrent,
so there used to be some info on the concurrent users
group web pages at www.ccuruser.org. That seems gone now,
but archive.org might help you dig up some old stuff there.

I used to help run one at the Columbia U CS dept; I remember that the
ethernet card had an 80186 that the OS downloaded a network stack to.
I seem to recall a hardcoded 14 or 15-hop limit on the IP stack on the
version we had, which confused us for a while when we wondered why the
machine would talk to some machines but not others.

I believe the owner of vitriol.com may still have a number of
operational or nearly-operational masscomps.
///
Received on Wed Nov 24 2004 - 06:47:36 GMT