Computing history at CERN - Re: what IBM system is this?

Rod Smallwood rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com
Sun Jul 5 05:09:00 CDT 2015


I remember being taken on a tour around Atlas as part of my college course.
It must have been about 1967/8.

I went back to work at Harwell (RRD next door to Chilton or Rutherford 
Labs as it was called)
  when I returned from Germany in 1971.

My job was to interface a PDP8/e to a triple axis neutron defractometer.
The 8/e only did data reduction and display.
I had already built a dedicated hardware system to do the positioning 
and stepping.
The BF3 counter gave a signal proportion to amplitude and the stepping 
controller the three position co-ordinates.
Result a 3D display of the scattered neutron pattern. What was it for?  
Finding out the structure of crystals.

We also had a straight 8 doing data processsing.

Rod

On 05/07/2015 09:47, Dave G4UGM wrote:
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Chuck
> Guzis
>> Sent: 05 July 2015 04:14
>> To: General at classiccmp.org; Discussion at classiccmp.org:On-Topic and Off-
>> Topic Posts
>> Subject: Re: Computing history at CERN - Re: what IBM system is this?
>>
>> On 07/04/2015 08:07 PM, Brent Hilpert wrote:
>>
>>> Note that that room is just for DD division machines - general
>>> computing services: data processing, number crunching, external
>>> networking, etc.
>>>
>>> At the time, the accelerator control was being done by Norsk-Data
>>> minis located in the accelerator control room, as shown and explained
>>> to me by someone who had worked on their programming; and there were
>>> machines all over the rest of the site associated with things like
>>> data-collection from experiment sensors, assorted labs, etc. I recall
>>> for instance, seeing a VAX-750 doing sensor data-collection, and a lab
>>> filled with some graphics machines, but don't recall what type they
>>> were.
>> Does anyone know of similar photos being taken at approximately the same
>> time at LLL or LANL?    I assume that there might also be some from NASA
>> Langley...
>>
>> Photos from other heavy-duty number-crunching installations of the time,
> such
>> as ECMWF would also be interesting.
>>
>> --Chuck
> There are some pictures on the Chilton site:-
>
> http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acl/technology/atlas/overview.htm
>
> but they are hard to find...
>
> Dave
>
>



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