5 Nov
1997
5 Nov
'97
noon
I have at home
a memory bank from a CDC Cyber two-hundred-and-something
(?) which is 18 bits wide. I had always assumed that this was 16 bits
plus two parity but it doesn't fit into 60 bits either way. (Memory
bank is huge quantities of 40ns and 45ns 64k x 1 static RAMs surface
mounted on both sides of numerous daughter boards. Each daughter board
is 64k x 18 and they stack four deep all over the "mother board" of the
bank.) I always meant to use this in something, but somehow I never got
around to it...
That is perhaps from one of the Cyber 203/205/215 supercomputers. These
were HUGE vector machines, from the same period (and a rival of) the later
Cray-1s. They were 60 bit machines, so I am confused about the x18
organization. Perhaps error checking was involved.