14 Oct
2016
14 Oct
'16
7:29 p.m.
I used most of the SEL/Gould/Encore machines. The 32/77 was an original
SEL design, from before Gould bought them. It ran MPX-32, their real-time
OS. TTL based. The 32/87 was ECL, in a much bigger cabinet. They made
slight hardware changes to the 32/77 and 32/75 and released them as the
PowerNode PN7000 and PN5000, which ran UTX-32, their Unix port. IIRC, we
took a few 77's and changed one board in the chassis to turn them into
PowerNodes.
The instruction set was more RISC-y than CISC-y. The floating point was
base 16 exponent rather than base 2. Because of the way they did
normalization, there were a lot of bit patterns which were impossible
results. I made a lot of use of those to represent special values.
I'm glad it was saved.
Bob: I may have a lot of software for it, if I can find the tapes and they
are still readable. I even got hold of their secret C compiler port.
On Fri, Oct 14, 2016 at 8:43 AM, Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote:
I have been given an lot of SEL software and
documentation, along with a
simulator
Now, I need to get off my butt and put it all on line.
Thank you for saving the system, Bob.
On 10/13/16 8:34 PM, Bob Rosenbloom wrote:
On 10/13/2016 9:01 AM, Rick Bensene wrote:
Well... with a momentary lapse of reason, I bought the Gould / SEL
system. It
won't go to scrap.
I'm
curious what the Systems 32/77 is..
Wasn't Gould SEL? maybe an SEL system?
The 32/77-series was a 32-bit machine implemented in ECL, based on
earlier SEL designs, but is definitely Gould in design/manufacture.
Some of the machines in the series had a very powerful (for the time)
floating point unit (known as the IPU) that operated in tandem with the
main CPU that vastly increased the number-crunching power available
The machines were mainly intended for real-time control applications (as
used in the flight sim applications in the auction)
The machine ran a real-time executive called MPX-32.
More information: http://www.encore-support.com/htmls/32_77.htm
Years ago, I had some experience with these machines. They were quite
powerful for their time, and were also workhorses that just ran and ran.
Very robust design.
These are neat machines, and I hope that they end up in the hands of
someone that can care for them rather than ending up scrap.
--
Rick Bensene
The Old Calculator Museum
http://oldcalculatormuseum.com
No idea how I'm going to get it, and what
I'm going to do with it, but
after reading about it last night,
I thought it might be fun to play with. We'll
see...
Bob