4 Nov
2010
4 Nov
'10
9:51 a.m.
On 4 Nov 2010 at 9:39, Jerome H. Fine wrote:
TI ASC???
TI's Advanced Scientific Computer. The only reason I was aware of
the ASC (and Burroughs' BSC) was because of some proprosal-writing I
did for ECMWF (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting)
proposal. We didn't get the contract, but part of your "homework" was
to become familiar with competitors' products.
From my often-faulty memory, the ASC was roughly based
on the IBM
S/360 instruction architecture with a rather arcane (at least it
seemed so to me) vector box. 32 bit single-precison/64 bit double-
precision with the S/360 style (8+24, normalized to 4 bits) floating
point representation.
I just did a check and there's some stuff on Bitsavers on it.
However, I don't see anything on the BSC there.
When we talk today about selling thousands and millions of systems,
it was a very different world where vast amounts of money and
manpower were put into the hope of selling 10 systems worldwide.
One aspect of these supercomputers that's often overlooked is the
amount of R&D that goes into peripherals to keep these things fed.
TI had a special horizontal-spindle disk drive; STAR had some work
done on a super-speed drum and a very wide tape-used-as-movable drum
called SCROLL. I don't think that CDC's EBAM was ever considered for
STAR (maybe early on), though I do recall seeing a rack of EBAM units
sitting in the hall at ADL.
By then, Jim Thornton had moved on to other things and was trenching
around the parking lot at Arden Hills, burying coax for his 50Mbps
network experiments.
--Chuck