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What Mainframe and why?

No mention of Burroughs or any of the old supercomputers, (Convex, Evans&Sutherland,...). I mentioned Cray and CDC. Nobody wants an ILLIAC IV?
 
The ground rules in #1 say that you don't bear the costs of powering, housing or maintenance. Seeing one in a museum isn't quite the same thing as using one.
Agreed. But when they need X amount of Kv to run with no downtime, the prospect becomes absurd. So just seeing the hardware is better than never having seen it.
 
What mainframe would you like to have and why?
- ignoring costs of running the thing, and assuming you had the space for it and things?

What would you do with it? e.g. use it as the worlds most expensive clock
Xerox Sigma 9 runing CP-V, with Fortran IV, BASIC, APL, Snobol, MetaSymbol, and of course Adventure (350 and 550 installed. OK, Cobol too. And Star Trek. Plus a Hazeltine 1500, a Hazeltine 2000, an ASR-33, and a DECwriter II (LA36), all connected with 300-baud modems (maybe one of the Hazeltines with a direct RS232 connection at 1200 baud).

What would I use if for? Playing Adventure on the Hazeltine terminals :) The rest is just for demonstration.
 
I recall that during the 70's OPEC oil embargo, my motel room (Arden Hills, MN) was too cold for me to get a good night's sleep. I grabbed a pillow and a book and settled down between the STAR SBU's at ADL. Nice and toasty--and nobody said a word.
I had a boss who worked on SAGE as an operator. He said that a scorned-by-management practice was to put your lunch in a cabinet with the electronics to keep it nice and warm. Troubleshooting started with looking at all of the tube heaters to see if any weren't glowing...
 
I am not sure if it is allowed but if it is then another option would be to have the WOPR and play either tic-tac-toe or Global Thermonuclear War.
 
I had a boss who worked on SAGE as an operator. He said that a scorned-by-management practice was to put your lunch in a cabinet with the electronics to keep it nice and warm. Troubleshooting started with looking at all of the tube heaters to see if any weren't glowing...
I never saw that, but I do recall guys who made a nest in the cable trays to grab catnaps.
 
Got an emulator for a CDC STAR-100 or ETA-10? Desktop CYBER is a bit buggy in my experience.
How so? So far as I have seen it is stable and mature. Try it again. Since I have yet to do actual changes (coming), I suggest Kevin Jordan's NCC branch at git on which mine is based.

The full NOS 2.8.7 PSR 871 for the Cyber 170-865 is well done, includes a dream development system for the full install (RFL,100000B. Before playing with a68, assuming unlimited field length for the user), and a nice production minimal install. The only major issues I see are system debug is enabled, user extended memory disabled, and one of the PLATO packs is rather full, and as such requires a log message dismissal at the console...BFD...minor nitpicks, all curable at the console at boot, before startup is even finished...one of these days, I'll alter the decks.

DtCyber has improved over the years, and drastically since BT did the license for NOS, etc.

My major complaint is the missing and mismatched documentation, some of which is cataloged as being in boxes at computer museums, etc. A lot of it is out there scanned already, and more all the time though, but a full matching documentation set would be nice, as well as that for CDC supported devices that are yet to be implemented in DtCyber.

On the documentation plus side, there is enough to work with for most stuff, and my pdf bookmarks make the manuals actually usable. I'll upload changed pdfs when I am done. NOS 2 System Analyst manual is more fun than the radiotron designers handbook 4th ed, and longer...ugh...people better appreciate these bookmarks when I upload....
 
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Hmmm - I am not sure where your "buggy" experience comes from.
It runs any and all 6000 and CYBER series operating systems including COS, SCOPE 3.1, KRONOS, NOS, NOS 2 and NOS/BE.
Desktop CYBER is being used for post-processing of telemetry data during rocket launches.
Oh well I am glad I have nothing to do with it anymore.
I read about that recently. I figured either PMTC or Vandenberg would be the final running production Cyber. I worked at PMTC a few miles Southeast from Vandenberg (Pt. Mugu is literally around the corner from Malibu, the literal corner).

Cool that the non-migrated programs run under dtcyber.
 
Xerox Sigma 9 runing CP-V, with Fortran IV, BASIC, APL, Snobol, MetaSymbol, and of course Adventure (350 and 550 installed. OK, Cobol too. And Star Trek. Plus a Hazeltine 1500, a Hazeltine 2000, an ASR-33, and a DECwriter II (LA36), all connected with 300-baud modems (maybe one of the Hazeltines with a direct RS232 connection at 1200 baud).

What would I use if for? Playing Adventure on the Hazeltine terminals :) The rest is just for demonstration.
The LA-120 used to rawk. Wouldn't mind finding one.
 
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