mo@messy.bellcore.com (Michael O'Dell) (10/04/90)
Best place to look is the old bit-serial wonders like the venerable Bendix G15 (looks remarkably like a Dr. Pepper vending machine of that era). If memory serves me, it had 27 bit registers or some such. I never programmed one; just admired people who did. the memory was a magnetic drum, but probably not like you think. It didn't have addressing like we think of a disk, the rotating surface was used as a delay line: two sets of read and write heads separated by about 45 degrees. the "long lines" were between them on the outside of the 270 degree segment, and the "short lines" wwere between them on the 45 degree side. Starting an idle G15 was a real hoot! You opened the right bay of the machine (swung out like the doors on a batwing Lincoln Continental), reached in side and found the flexible coupling between the motor and the drum, and grabbed it gently giving it a few turns. this released the stiction so the motor didn't rip the heads off when it started. It reminded me very much of a hammond organ in that once you got the drum coasting along, you hit the starter switch and the motor groaned to life and spun up to speed. anyway, i think this satisfies "weird." -Mike
eugene@eos.UUCP (Eugene Miya) (10/05/90)
A Soviet machine has a 33-bit word. Ask Tony Ralston (I think still at
Arizona) if you need a ref. I remember reading this in a survey of Eastern
Bloc parallel computing projects.
--e.n. miya, NASA Ames Research Center, eugene@eos.arc.nasa.gov
{uunet,mailrus,most gateways}!ames!eugenercd@ico.isc.com (Dick Dunn) (10/10/90)
mo@messy.bellcore.com (Michael O'Dell) writes: > Best place to look is the old bit-serial wonders like the venerable > Bendix G15 (looks remarkably like a Dr. Pepper vending machine of > that era). If memory serves me, it had 27 bit registers or some such. No, it was 29. That should qualify it for being weirder, since 29 is prime, but it actually made more sense that way: 29 is 4 7-bit characters (console was a Selectric) without running into the sign bit...so compares worked better. Just to compound the weirdness (and get further from architecture:-), the G-15 world referred to radix-16 as "sexadecimal" and used uvwxyz instead of abcdef for the extra six digits. -- Dick Dunn rcd@ico.isc.com -or- ico!rcd Boulder, CO (303)449-2870 ...Worst-case analysis must never begin with "No one would ever want..."
rcd@ico.isc.com (Dick Dunn) (10/10/90)
This is even less relevant than the previous one, but if I don't correct it (and probably even if I do:-) I'll get toasted for the mistake. In article <1990Oct9.224712.4101@ico.isc.com>, I screwed up. Talking about the Bendix G-15, I said... > (console was a Selectric)... Now, any damned fool (except me:-) knows that the Selectric wasn't around in the early days of the G-15. It was an IBM electric typewriter, but it was *not* a Selectric. (And no, it wasn't a Flexowronger.) -- Dick Dunn rcd@ico.isc.com -or- ico!rcd Boulder, CO (303)449-2870 ...Worst-case analysis must never begin with "No one would ever want..."
hays@isc.intel.com (Kirk Hays) (10/10/90)
In article <7367@eos.UUCP> eugene@eos.UUCP (Eugene Miya) writes: >A Soviet machine has a 33-bit word. Ask Tony Ralston (I think still at >Arizona) if you need a ref. I remember reading this in a survey of Eastern >Bloc parallel computing projects. > >--e.n. miya, NASA Ames Research Center, eugene@eos.arc.nasa.gov > {uunet,mailrus,most gateways}!ames!eugene Some of the (early?) Soviet machines used trinary arithmetic, as well, with values (-1, 0, 1) for each "trit". Leads to some interesting algorithms for multiplication, if I remember correctly... -- Kirk Hays - NRA Life. Dulce et Decorum est, pro patra mori. "The way of the samurai is found in death. It is this simple. If you can accept it then you will fight as though you are already dead." Tsunemoto Yamamoto, _Hagakure_