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SEL/Gould/Encore Concept-32 and PowerNode computers... anyone??

geerol58

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Jun 29, 2019
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Winssen, NL
About halfway the 70's System Engineering Laboratories (S.E.L.) brought the first Concept-32 to the market. It was a rather powerful 32 computer with a fast bus and an optional second CPU. These computers were mainly used in scientific and simulation business and were very often used in Flight Simulators (not the game, the real ones).
When Gould took over S.E.L. another productline was invented: the PowerNode 6000 and 9000. These machines, still based on the Concept-32 line, were to be used with UTX, a Unix derivative. Close to the end of this history the company was taken over by Encore.

Anyone who worked with these machines?? I did, I have a PowerNode 6040D

PN2.jpg
 
We had a PN6080 for third year comp sci students at my uni, to lighten the load on the 11/780's. Everyone just called it 'The Gould'. It was a wholly unremarkable machine running a BSD variant, UTX/32.
The good disk had the system and staff accounts, and the flaky drive had student accounts and tmp on it. I recall it was down way WAY more frequently than the VAXes (running VMS) and it really struggled when students were running their UNSW Prolog assignments. I think we had it because the department got a great deal on it. I've never encountered a Gould since that time.
 
We had a PN6080 for third year comp sci students at my uni, to lighten the load on the 11/780's. Everyone just called it 'The Gould'. It was a wholly unremarkable machine running a BSD variant, UTX/32.
The good disk had the system and staff accounts, and the flaky drive had student accounts and tmp on it. I recall it was down way WAY more frequently than the VAXes (running VMS) and it really struggled when students were running their UNSW Prolog assignments. I think we had it because the department got a great deal on it. I've never encountered a Gould since that time.
We had a freebie loaner system (I forget the model) running MPX and MPX Fortran, to do a port of some animation software (Antics) originally written for VMS on a 780 with VAX Fortran. The porting effort was long and drawn-out, and when the program was finally fully compilable and built/linked, the developer leading the project finally got us all around to watch the first run. And nothing happened... and continued to happen... Finally, just as he was about to interrupt the program, it spit out the message "Arfur mo!" on the terminal. After a bit of puzzled wondering by everyone as to what that meant, I realized it was British slang for "Wait a second" ('Half a moment'). We'd never seen that message before as on VMS it was erased immediately (if no sooner) by Antics putting the Tek terminal into graphics mode. Needless to say, the port was not a success, and the machine went back to Gould with a firm "No thanks".

I did save a bunch of the freebies that came along with it. There were 3D blue foam cutouts of the MPX and UTX logos (which eventually went the way of all foam, degrading into brown glue that ruined everything it came into contact with) as well as some other goodies that I don't remember - possibly a 3-sided highlighter and a Frisbee.
 
i used a Gould system in college, part of the computers in the computer science department. It ran BSD Unix. About all I remember. After several years, it was very flakey, and kept going down. I don’t remember what it wa replaced with. The department also had a vax, but that seemed to be used only for intro courses (including as a front end to IBM for assembly).
 
About halfway the 70's System Engineering Laboratories (S.E.L.) brought the first Concept-32 to the market. It was a rather powerful 32 computer with a fast bus and an optional second CPU. These computers were mainly used in scientific and simulation business and were very often used in Flight Simulators (not the game, the real ones).
When Gould took over S.E.L. another productline was invented: the PowerNode 6000 and 9000. These machines, still based on the Concept-32 line, were to be used with UTX, a Unix derivative. Close to the end of this history the company was taken over by Encore.

Anyone who worked with these machines?? I did, I have a PowerNode 6040D

View attachment 1067031
Hi, i worked for Gould s/w engineer from 1980-1983 and worked on most systems
 
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