Computer collecting humor. - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

5 Nov 1997

...
   I have at home
a memory bank from a CDC Cyber two-hundred-and-something 
 (?) which is 18 bits wide.  I had always assumed that this was 16 bits 
 plus two parity but it doesn't fit into 60 bits either way.  (Memory 
 bank is huge quantities of 40ns and 45ns 64k x 1 static RAMs surface 
 mounted on both sides of numerous daughter boards.  Each daughter board 
 is 64k x 18 and they stack four deep all over the "mother board" of the 
 bank.)  I always meant to use this in something, but somehow I never got 
 around to it... 
 That is perhaps from one of the Cyber 203/205/215 supercomputers. These 
 were HUGE vector machines, from the same period (and a rival of) the later 
 Cray-1s. They were 60 bit machines, so I am confused about the x18 
 organization. Perhaps error checking was involved. 
This one was thrown out by the Technical University of {better not say 
where} in 1993.  Not very old - date code on some of the memory chips is 
1992.

My friend, a student there, whom I visited in August of that year, had 
eight of these memory banks, eight megabytes each (64k x 2 bytes x four 
boards deep x sixteen stacks per bank).  I swapped him a Keithley 417k 
electrometer (a very sensitive multimeter) for mine.

He also threw in a card from the CPU, which I think I've mentioned here 
before.  The technology is 100k series ECL so should have been faster 
than Cray 1.  (The Cray 1 in the {museum of same town} was 10k series.)  