The pre-history of the Digital Equipment Corporation

[DaveH]

I found this during a coffee break brows and thought it might be of interest to other forum members.

http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/CCS/res/res04.htm

Dave H

 

[Marty]

Hi All;
Every so often, I go and get what has been put online in PDF format, the latest issues of Resurrection.. And I have done this for a long time, since its earliest days online.. It is very interesting reading most of the time..

THANK YOU Marty

 

[Al Kossow]

I found this during a coffee break brows and thought it might be of interest to other forum members.

http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/CCS/res/res04.htm

Dave H

The article is incorrect

"Whirlwind ran in this role until June 30 1959. On of the project team, Bill Wolf, rented the machine for a dollar a year until the late 1970's after which Ken Olsen, the DEC president, looked after it for a while before transferring it to the Smithsonian."

Whirlwind was the size of two floors of the Barta Building in Cambridge, MA., counting the power supplies.
The Computer History Museum has a large portion of it, mostly consisting of rack panels (the racks apparently weren't saved).
I don't know what, if anything, went to SI.

The Digital Computer Museum had TX-0 running for a while, then it was disassembled with some of it going back to MITRE, and some of
it ending up in CHM's collection. CHM has the Whirlwind and TX-0 paper tape library.

 

[KC9UDX]

The article is incorrect

It's chock full of the stereotypical pre-internet research errors.

Motorola-style devices, including the Rockwell 65xx family, use a very DEC-like arrangement of memory mapped I/O registers