14 Jul
2015
14 Jul
'15
1:48 p.m.
Sure, but channel controllers and PPUs are very
different beasts. You can?t run your OS on a channel controller, which is exactly what
Cray did on the 6600. Nor can you implement the entire operator user interface on a
channel controller, as was done in the DSD PPU program.
Yes, I realize that a CDC PPU is a very versatile I/O processor,
compared to channel controllers from other vendors, but the PPU idea
pretty much stayed with CDC and nobody else. It fails the "novel
features in the 6600 that were widely adopted by other machines" test.
--
Will