PC power supplies (the Joy of Standards)

[Roland Perry]

In message , at

18:55:07 on Tue, 23 May 2006, CWatters remarked:

I have no idea, and little inclination to research their spec :)

[Jules]

Actually yes, you did do some of my OS lectures. I was in Darwin for my first year too and you were Master there at the time.

Nice place in the early 90's for computing - definitely one of the top ten in the country at the time. I get the impression it's gone downhill since a bit and it's all Windows machines nowadays.

That's a start - you just need a few more tons of gubbins to go around it :-)

Hmm, you did according to the Computing newsletters :-) I *think* it arrived somewhere around 1987 and got retired in '94 or '95. No idea who used it - we just got let loose on the Meiko.

Well I hope they're either still there or they went to good homes rather than just to the crusher - I've got no idea who to ask these days though.

Well EMAS is looking like the best bet for our 2966 at present - although we've got wind of another 2966 running in private hands in St. Petersburg of all places (the Russian one, not the one in the US :) - no idea what OS that one's got.

I'm of the mind that EMAS might be more suitable anyway as if it was aimed at academics rather than business then hopefully it's a little more accessible to us mere mortals (albeit none too friendly by modern standards!)

Plus of course it'd be good for the Edinburgh project too! If all goes to plan it'll probably be autumn time when we can get the system into the new building - at least then it'll be secure and dry and can be properly assessed as to condition. Beyond that it's probably a case of finding enough enthusiasts to properly restore it back to health. Can't wait to see it filling a room again!

cheers

Jules

[Jules]

It's always a shame when that happens. SGI UK are known for just crushing old kit too, which is a pity considering some of the big systems that they built before they took the Windows route to oblivion.

I've got a particular interest in Transputer systems - I'd like to find some more for the museum, but so far all we've managed to locate are a trio of ITEM crates. Bit of a far cry from the 100-odd CPU monsters that used to be knocking around the country.

cheers

Jules

[Jules]

I forgot to mention, but we've apparently taken delivery of ICL's document archive that was previously owned by Fujitsu (I say apparently as I'm overseas at the moment - won't be back to check it out for another three weeks).

It's all on punched cards with a single microfiche per card - the complete rack's something like 2 feet deep, 4 feet tall, and 30 feet long; I hate to think how many million cards that is. Hopefully Fujitsu have given us the index or will be following up with whatever machine actually contains it! :-)

[Bob Eager]

I gave that up after ten years. I teach operating systems, a bit of hardware, some compiler stuff next year, etc...

It's still in the top ten. We use Windows in the first year 'cos everyone knows it, but UNIX after that for a lot...you may not know that we were the first university in the country to have UNIX (and I was one of the first five users)...back in 1976. 30 years of UNIX for me, come July!

No, we had access to the Edinburgh one., Believe me, I'd have known...unless it was attached to soemthing other than the 2960s.

At least the CLI used real words and not abbreviations...

Same here!

[August West]

Fabulous! It'd be nice to see EMAS up again - it was a very well designed OS. Far beter than the various VMEs (see my User-Agent: header).

Edinburgh just doesn't get the kudos it deserves for all the work done on EMAS (and IMP). Not that I studdied there (I was at Manchster, but used EMAS over damp string fron Glasgow, in the 1980s).

[Bob Eager]

You might like to see my bit:

also:

[August West]

work with some of the people mentioned, at 3L Ltd -- Peter Robertson & Ian Young -- after I left inmos!

[Rod]

"Bob Eager" wrote in news: [e-mail]:

Ah - Millennium. If it hadn't been written so badly you wouldn't have needed to write a compiler! But I do think that it might have beaten the IBM implementation hands down in the end - probably thanks to that compiler.

I managed to drop run times by massive percentages on that just by rewriting the SCL (control language) bits!

[Andrew Gabriel]

It was indeed around in Elliott days. I don't know how different it was from the 4100, but that was mostly a rebadged NCR machine and was initially launched as the NCR Elliott 4100. In the later split up between GEC and ICT, it was classed as a data processing machine and thus went to ICT. (The realtime process control systems went to GEC Marconi.)

[Richard Tobin]

We're still waiting for the free software version - GNU Emas.

This is what we call "damning with faint praise".

-- Richard

[James Wilson]

Just for the record (I've posted regarding this before) I have a few racks from a Whitecross WX9020 system. It has approx 400 T425s. Powers up and runs diagnostics but haven't had time to take it any further yet (growing family!). Plan is to make it publicly available in a manner similar to Cray-Cyber. Sorry, not offering it to a museum just yet. I want to play first ;)

James

[Rod]

Jules wrote in news: [e-mail]:

Amazing what you find, totally accidentally, when looking for something completely else! Whether standard or not, you can *test* your -5 (and +5, etc.) with one of these:

[Jules]

I can't begin to imagine trying to control a few hundred drunken first-years ;-)

Aha - the rumours make it out to be a lot worse; possibly they all stem from first years who haven't got access to the real computers yet :-)

Mind you, I don't miss those horrible Alphatronic terminals that were littered all over campus. The NCD Xterms weren't half bad, though - and the holy grail was to get into the graphics lab with the SGIs...

(I think I've still got three of UKC's Alphatronics back in the UK for some unknown reason - one's even boxed)

Hah ha - seriously? I remember the prospectus made a big deal out of "our" DAP, and there was never anything in the computing newsletters to suggest it was owned by someone else or off-site.

Any ideas what happened to the Edinburgh one then? I know there was one at Bristol uni that's now in private hands, so there's at least one still in the UK.

The Science Museum don't list one, unfortunately. Although interestingly, they do seem to have a 1500, 1903, and most of a 2904...

cheers

Jules

[Bob Eager]

I did a much better job on the VAX implementation. That was fun; by that time the guys in the USA were saying that it was impossible to do a compiler, and even it if weren't, it wouldn't make a difference. We sent the VAX compiler off to them and they went all quiet. I really enjoyed that....

[Bob Eager]

Going into a party of 50 drunken students at 3 a.m., armed only with two security guards, and turning off the sound system...I'm glad I'm big!

May have been on the Meiko.

Dunno.

[August West]

Indeed. But then, GEORGE was better than VME.

[Bob Eager]

And practically *anything* was better than VME/K....

[Richard Tobin]

I once wrote an Algol-68 program that translated simple Basic programs into GEORGE macros. I still have some of the punched cards stuck in my floppy disk drive.

-- Richard

[Jules]

Heh heh, understandable! We'd gladly give it a home if you do ever need the space though - we're building a national museum for computing and have a large room set aside along a broad theme of supercomputing and it's surprising how difficult it is to fill. Most of the seriously parallel/fast hardware of the 80's and 90's was pretty specific to the job that it was bought for, and so was just junked at the end rather than being offered further afield.

Of course if you're within driving distance of Bletchley you could install it there and have free power ;-)

Seriously though, sounds like a very nice bit of hardware - good luck in getting it fully operational. How many processors did the original installed system have? Your mention of a few racks suggests that the original install was quite a bit larger (and 400 processors I think is already the largest surviving system I've come across in the UK)

cheers

Jules