Foxboro

Jules Richardson wrote: The refinery has been dismantled slowly over the past 10 years and I have no idea how much longer the land will sit idle (the building containing the equipment could come down next week or in 10 years). Time required for soil remediation from 100 years of 'less-environmentally-concerned' practices is the main reason I believe. Then there's land speculation ... oh scratch that, we don't call it that anymore because we're not supposed to be doing it .. I think it's called "market timing" now. James Rice wrote: Thanks for the comments, I too found their home page and brief history after I sent the first message - had no idea they had been around that long. Al Kossow wrote: Oooh! ... it's a cosmic coincidence: I came across the Foxboro when out for a run in the *forest* and a dip in the *lake*, and the big double-page colour photo spread (*1) in the brochure from 1971 has a Foxboro system arrayed in a *forest* setting beside a *lake*. (*1: is that what is called 'computer-porn'?) .. ya 'gotta love marketing stuff from the 70s. And this profundity from the text: " Now for the first time man meets process on his own terms. " Actually, in addition to the amusement factor, the brochure is very informative; thanks greatly for putting it up. The video consoles in the brochure look like the one I saw at the refinery. The double cabinet I saw looks similar to those big 'secondary' cabinets behind the consoles in the above-mentioned photo spread. I didn't see the X-shaped CPU at the refinery, so either something changed in the physical form or perhaps what I came across was a remote operator's station and the main processor was in another building. From the brochure it sounds like it was quite a modern architecture for the time - hardware return stack, byte addressing, etc. and the software packages for the process-control sound interesting. Rescue has it's problems. I think it must have been lifted into it's location on the second floor by a crane, the cabinets would have to be dismantled down to manageable bits now to get it out. It may be beyond usefulness, as suggested above it looks like it probably isn't the entire system. It would be neat to get the console, do some reverse engineering, figure out the comm protocol and set it up as a graphics terminal, but it appeared to be missing the keyboard, and may have been already used as a donor machine. Perhaps I'll go for another run. With a flashlight and screwdriver. I would guess there is a -small- possibility that the remainder of the system is in the still-in-use buildings on site. Fantasy/hindsight: It would be neat to actually get such a system at the point of decommission, when it's still operating and the original plant software is still around, rescue it all, build a back-end simulation of the physical plant, connect the sim to the processor I/O and have a functioning system with neato 60s/70s vector-graphic displays updated in real-time, etc. Such a system bears a lot more resemblance to how we use computers today, even at the personal desktop level, than the line-at-a-time or batch-oriented systems from that period that are more commonly preserved. Most of computer hardware history presentation seems to be to show how much things have changed, rather than what is similar. Such a system as this would show another side of 'early computing', what was possible, and was done, in that period. (And how much was done with a processor with ~16-32KW RAM and ~1MHz basic clock rate (specs from the brochure) ). It did occur to me in the early 90s when they started talking about shutting down the refining operations to go ask about the computer system, but I didn't know where I could put it physically (and still don't), and I didn't know anyone else at the time that would even possibly be interested in such stuff.