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ND-10 (was Re: DMA is obsolete)

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  ND-10 (was Re: DMA is obsolete) Lars Poulsen <lars@beagle-ears.com> - 2025-05-03 23:30 +0000
    Re: ND-10 (was Re: DMA is obsolete) mitchalsup@aol.com (MitchAlsup1) - 2025-05-04 02:04 +0000
    Re: ND-10 (was Re: DMA is obsolete) Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-05-04 02:10 +0000

#230941 — ND-10 (was Re: DMA is obsolete)

MitchAlsup1 wrote:
>> It is more like the Peripheral Processors of CDC 6600 that run
>> ISA of a CDC 6600 without as much fancy execution in periphery.

I seem to remember the CDC 6000 series as 60 bit ISA, with the PPUs
being 12-bit. Is that wrong?

On 2025-05-03, Terje Mathisen <terje.mathisen@tmsw.no> wrote:
> Similar timeframe: The ND10 minis were popular in process control, CERN 
> bought a brace of them.
>
> When they later came out with the larger ND100 and then ND500 machines, 
> the latter had a 100 (or 10?) as a front-end IO processor, partially 
> required because the original ND10 came with a very early version of 
> SINTRAN os which didn't have proper/complete IO support, so customers 
> had written machine code to handle it.
>
> The 500 wasn't machine code compatible, so all such IO routines then had 
> to run on the front-end processor.

My first job after I finished my apprentice years at the Copenhagen
University Computer Center, was at a bespoke engineering house mostly
interfacing specialty equipment at research labs. My first project there
(fall 1985) was writing a SINTRAN device driver for an A/D scanner with
a hundred or so channels. Debugging was fun. SINTARN was written in
PL-10, a programming language invented for the purpose. The command
language was unexpectedly smart, allowing many abbreviations for the
commands. I think the same abbreviation rules also applied to filenames.

The most memorable thing about the project, was that this was a very
early use of solid-state memory. The SRAM chips used, had a bug that
sometimes reverted bits to a state that they had earlier stored for a
prolonged amount of time. Really fun when tha affected memory word was
an allocation bitmap for memory pages or for disk sectors!!

I enjoyed the weeks I spent in Oslo learning the OS operation and system
build procedure.

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#230943

On Sat, 3 May 2025 23:30:52 +0000, Lars Poulsen wrote:

> MitchAlsup1 wrote:
>>> It is more like the Peripheral Processors of CDC 6600 that run
>>> ISA of a CDC 6600 without as much fancy execution in periphery.
>
> I seem to remember the CDC 6000 series as 60 bit ISA, with the PPUs
> being 12-bit. Is that wrong?

Yes, that is correct. In addition, there was 1 peripheral processor
that had a 10 cycle barrel of operation--giving the illusion of 10
PPs.

So, on the one hand we have a GBOoO machine (6600) capable of 1 IPC
(but typically running at 4 CPI) and 10 PPs no faster than 10 CPI.
{{an IBM 360/67 was about 6 CPI at that time}}

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#230944

On Sat, 3 May 2025 23:30:52 -0000 (UTC), Lars Poulsen wrote:

> The command language was unexpectedly smart, allowing many
> abbreviations for the commands. I think the same abbreviation rules
> also applied to filenames.

I should hope not. It’s bad enough having the possibility of scripts 
breaking in later OS versions, just because some new command got added, 
it’s worse if the breakage can happen just because a new file was created 
that the script wasn’t expecting.

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