Bruce wrote: we software "Ruggedized"? Puh-lease ;-) Norden made "ruggedized" stuff, meaning commercial boards stuffed into a beefed-up chassis. We made _militarized_ stuff at ROLM, which with of two painful exceptions were not even based on DG implementations (so-called "punches" of DG machines; one was a 1/2 ATR S/130 clone, the other was a punch of the MV8K that was so incredibly miserable that only two were built). Life at ROLM started with the 1601, which was essentially a Nova 800, and progressed through the 1666, which added things like stacks but in a fashion utterly incompatible with the way DG wedged them into the Nova 3. Most 16XX series machines went to the Navy, although as far as I can tell the largest single buyer of them was MacDAC for use in the GLCM/SLCM (ground/sea launch cruise missile) erector/launch system. As an interesting(?) aside, the 16xx machines maintained the Nova I/O bus, including the utter lack of parity or any other form of error detection. When the NAB people got wind of this they went (understandably) nuts and Eddie Yee had to work magic with ROLM's version of RTOS in order for the system to qualify for use with "specials". As Bruce suggested, _most_ DG code would run on ROLM processors, although ROLM also vended its own operating systems (ARTS and ARTS/32) and peddled their own language (MSL -- The "MilSpec Language" which looked a great deal like something between BCPL and C, minus byte pointers, which were a pain in the ass to make work right thanks to the fact that the Nova was a word oriented machine). The culmination of hardware at ROLM was the Hawk/32, which was an original implementation of the Eagle (MV) architecture, which was supposed to be coupled with a painfully advanced B3-secure distributed OS named MARVIN (the derivation of the name is complex; basically those of us who were originally assigned to the project were considered to have bad attitudes so the project took its name The Galaxy". When pressed by marketing for the underlying meaning of the term, we offered up "Multiprocessor Advanced Virtually Interconnected Network", which the marketing drones gobbled up and immediately started regurgitating to the customer base). MARVIN hit the dustbin about the time that the MSC division was purchased from IBM by Loral. In a blast-from-the-past, the PlayStation II/CPU2 project brought three of us ROLM refugees together at Toshiba. Each of us had in tow a statue of a hawk that was handed out upon completion of the Hawk/32 project. As each of us jointed the project the staff would be abuzz about how we were stealing this statue from each other -- until they realized that there were several of these things running around the office... Back to the D-116; I have a complete set of prints hanging about if someone needs copies. They appear to have belonged to a FE; the print for the front panel has been attacked with color highlighters, and the microswitch that disables the front panel when the key is in the "lock" position has a large circle drawn around it with a like leading to handwritten text that reads: "Dear diary: Today is fucked". -- Chris Kennedy chris(a)mainecoon.com http://www.mainecoon.com PGP fingerprint: 4E99 10B6 7253 B048 6685 6CBC 55E1 20A3 108D AB97

I know there's lots of those Rolms still in use by the military. At least they were everywhere when I field serviced Vax systems at Fort Monmouth (a hotbed of Army software development) in the mid '80's. Bill

On Mon, 7 May 2001, Sellam Ismail wrote: I'm completely lame. I was thinking of the DDP-24. Never mind. Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org