3 Sep
2009
3 Sep
'09
11:11 a.m.
On 3 Sep 2009 at 11:27, Ben wrote:
This is 1976 ... did they have 9600 modems back then
that a human
could afford!
Sure they did--you leased a 209 from Ma Bell--but that was IIRC,
sync, not async. But no one said anything about modems--more likely,
these things just connected to a mainframe.
Any guesses what the hardware on the floating point
board was?
TTL glue and bipolar PROMs, believe it or not, operating in BCD. Add
time was quoted at 20 uzec and multiply at 100 usec. The most
complex function IC was a 74S181 ALU.
Text based is fine with me.
Here's the PDF download link:
http://csdl2.computer.org/comp/mags/co/1976/09/01647483.pdf
I don't know if the IEEE gateway will block access or not. But the
HTML rendition of the document is nearly unreadable because of OCR
errors.
--Chuck