2 Feb
1999
2 Feb
'99
11:43 a.m.
...
The Meta 4 (from Digital Scientific) was a clone of the
IBM 1130, made in San Diego (ok, maybe Del Mar or Sorrento
In fact, the Computerwoche article above maintains it is San Diego. I've
seen San Diego in other Meta 4 references I've found like the one Stan
offers below. >Valley area) around 1970. IIRC it was called an
1130 clone, but
>actually had the extra instruction(s) that would really make it an 1800
>clone.
Yes it had the set/clear memory protection bits. The memory arrays in
IBM
1130/1800's were 18 bits ... 16 data bits and 2 parity bits for an 1130 and
16 bits, one parity bit and one memory protect bit for the 1800.
>
>I remember that the Meta 4 had firmware that was implemented on
>boards about 1 foot by 1 foot, with little copper squares of foil about
>the 1/4" by 1/4" ...indicating 1/0 by presence/absence. One problem
>was that the squares would sometimes lift up a bit, so we'd take out
>the boards and press them down again.
Yes it was a type of capacitor Read Only Storage with a read cycle of 90 ns.
I remember we
also had APL, on a removable disk cartridge.
In the pages I've seen so far, the 1130 is said to have a max of 16KWord of
memory but my professors at school were bragging about our machine having
32K of memory (in 1972). Was there in fact an upgrade to 32K _words_ or
were they simply getting 32K bytes and 16K words confoozed? Remember, this
was all quite new to these older age professors then when few
backwater-area colleges our size even had a computer.