14 Apr
2024
14 Apr
'24
1:02 p.m.
On Sun, 2024-04-14 at 15:11 -0400, Paul Koning wrote:
Varian bought Data Machines Inc, which had a computer called 620i. It
fit in a 9U rack unit. When Varian built the V70 series, they fit in a
4U unit. Varian implemented the 620 instruction set, with a few
extensions, in microcode ROM, and called it 620f. Writable Control
Store (WCS) was an extra-cost option. WCS came in blocks of 512 64-bit
words. I think three blocks of WCS could be added. My senior
undergraduate project consisted of writing microcode for a V73 to
implement the IBM 1130 instruction set. That fit in about 450 words. I
did that because the University had replaced their 1130 with the V73,
and then discovered that Varian didn't offer a COBOL compiler, and they
wanted to continue to teach COBOL. As one would expect, I/O is quite
different, and there wasn't room to do it in micocode in the one block
of WCS they had bought, so two faculty members, Frank Kollar and
Delmorris Blakely, both expert with IBM 1130 and V73, wrote I/O support
that ran in 620f mode. 1130 support was put onto the removable paltter
in the Winchester drive. A switch was added to exchange the "drive
numbers" so the boot key loaded either VORTEX or the 1130 support, so
COBOL students didn't need to learn how to use the VORTEX command
shell. In the end, the V73 pretending to be an 1130 was up to thirty
times faster. If anybody wants the microcode (and flow charts), I can
send it. I never had the I/O support in electronic form, and I gave the
listings to the Computer History Museum many years ago. Maybe Al Kossow
scanned them, maybe not.
Varian Data Machines was sold to Unisys, who pounded it into the
ground.
On Apr 14,
2024, at 2:50 PM, Van Snyder via cctalk <
cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
On Sun, 2024-04-14 at 13:15 -0400, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:
I remember a Varian computer sitting in a corner of a lab at U of
Illinois (computer science department). It looks similar to the ones
shown in Bitsavers but not quite the same -- it had a front panel
that had mostly brown coloring, and the panel was totally flat. It
used membrane pushbuttons for operation, with the button positions
marked by circles on the flat plastic front panel.
Does that ring any bells? I remember being told it had user
programmable microcode, but I never used it, in fact I never heard of
anyone using it.
The printer I was describing sounds a lot like
the Versatec ones
youmentioned, including the funny paper and smelly toner. But it
wasactually made by Varian, and the driver tells me it had 1408
pixelsacross the width of the paper, so at 11 inches wide that
would makeit 128 PPI. I wonder if I still have a sample page or
two from thatprinter.
American Geophysical had a fleet of trucks fitted with
hydraulic"thumpers." They would go out to a potential oil or gas
field, lay outa few thousand feet of cables with geophones on them,
and drive aroundthumping the ground. Within the truck, they had
Varian V70 computerswith microcode to do Fast Fourier Transforms.