14 Oct
2004
14 Oct
'04
1:03 a.m.
Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk(a)yahoo.co.uk> writes:
Anyone out there got any info on Masscomp machines (or
own one)? I found
one the other day at BP (in something of a sorry state) but info on the
'net seems pretty scarce. Rumour has it that they ran some flavour of
real-time Unix, and that multi-cpu machines were available - that's
about all the good ol' Internet has to offer, at least according to
Google.
Masscomp did indeed make multi-cpu machines,
and also had an os called RTU (Real Time Unix).
They also had another unix called, I think, OS/32.
I don't know which one was used by the multiprocessor boxes.
I think the CPUs were mostly 68k's,
system bus might have been multibus.
They had early successes as graphics/cad workstations,
so yes they had mice. Masscomp was bought by Concurrent,
so there used to be some info on the concurrent users
group web pages at www.ccuruser.org. That seems gone now,
but archive.org might help you dig up some old stuff there.
I used to help run one at the Columbia U CS dept; I remember that the
ethernet card had an 80186 that the OS downloaded a network stack to.
I seem to recall a hardcoded 14 or 15-hop limit on the IP stack on the
version we had, which confused us for a while when we wondered why the
machine would talk to some machines but not others.
I believe the owner of vitriol.com may still have a number of
operational or nearly-operational masscomps.
--akb