On 7 Mar 2020 19:37:00 GMT, Charlie Gibbs 
declaimed the following:

>My first programming job, in 1970, was on a Univac 9300 - their answer
>to the IBM 360/20.  It had 16K of memory.  Not gigabytes, or megabytes,
>but kilobytes.  No disks, no tape - just cards.  You really learned how
>to squeeze program code.  When we added disks (a pair of IBM 2311 clones),
>we expanded the memory to a whopping 32K.  We wondered what we were
>going to do with all that space.
>

 My college had a Xerox Sigma-6 running CP/V. Four-bank/four-port
interleaved memory (this allowed for the CPU to access a bank using one
port, and three I/O processors to access the other banks using the other
ports -- simultaneously, and the interleave meant all four processors
basically chased each other through the memory banks). I'd swear we were
told it had 1MB of RAM, but the system reference manual claimed it only
handled 128k "words" (32-bit; 16-bit was a "halfword", so 512kB). Four
refrigerator sized cabinets, one per memory bank -- but if one opened a
cabinet, one found one or two circuit cards sitting in the bottom third.
The original magnetic core had been replaced with static RAM ICs (as I
recall, the main processor used DTL logic chips, not even TTL!).

 We often had some 60+ active terminals scattered over the campus (this
is in a time period where a "graphics terminal" was an APL-keyboard
Tektronix storage display tube. Common terminals were Hazeltine 1200 and
2000 models.

 I remember the year they got in two new disk drives which were
dedicated to system software and process swap space as I recall. These two
were a whopping 300MB each. The other six drives we had were 11-platter
(20-writable surfaces) units rated 100MB each.

 They also replaced a room full of Gandalf communications gear (handling
the terminals to mainframe) with a Honeywell Level-6 minicomputer and lots
of I/O ports. It worked nicely except... when the processor board got warm.
The board was mounted horizontally, and had a tendency to sag in high
temperatures, losing contact with the edge connectors.

 We also had a year where the Sigma tended to crash around 7AM every
day. Finally tracked down to the PBS station (hosted in the same building)
powering up the transmitter each morning. So... A large fly-wheel
motor-generator set was installed to smooth out the power supply.


--
 Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN
 wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    http://wlfraed.microdiversity.freeddns.org/

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