The first VAX-11/780 rolled off the prouction line in October 1977 and the machine was officially announced in November 1977. I'd be very surprised if it turned out to be the first computer with a real-time clock fitted as standard! The 1973 pdp-11 processor handbook indicates that the PDP-11/05 and PDP-11/10 had a line frequency clock and the PDP-11/35 and PDP-11/40 are pre-wired to accept a KW11-I. So they could track the passage of time, but not while the power was off. I doubt that any PDP-8 came with any such option so the only realistic DEC possibility left would be the PDP-10 range, of which I have no experience. Antonio -- --------------- Antonio Carlini arcarlini(a)iee.org

Ok. I admit I've been away a few days and haven't read the ENTIRE thread on this topic, but I thought I'd at least weigh-in with a "sort of" example of a mid-60s time-of-day clock on a mainframe machine. The good old Control Data 3300 had a 24 bit millisecond counter that was used (at least on our operating system) as a pseudo real-time clock. With 24 bits, you could count up to about 16k seconds before overflow. Normal use of the counter was to program future timer events (another register was set to the count at which you wanted an interrupt.) Rather than just resetting the count register for every interrupt and programming the length in the limit register, the OS would read the current count, add the desired delay and write THAT value to the limit. Thus, the counter would count monotonically. For our purpose, we did reset counter every hour, so the "real time clock" register (which was readable by any user process) counted accumulated milliseconds in the current hour. Another read-only register was used to hold the "date" (packed in good-old non-y2k compliant form,) with a 5 bit field reserved for "hour of the day." One advantage of this "free running" counter as a time-of-day clock was that in the unlikely of a system hang where interrupts might not get serviced for a while (the only recoverable one of these was a memory parity error on "pure" system code, where a checksum was recalculated to recover the "lost" location of the parity error) and that could take a few milliseconds. Never fear, the RTC register was counting away and wouldn't lose time. Even if it happened to count beyond an hour, it would be caught before the next user task was scheduled and the date register would be recalculated. This is basically what was done on the VAX series, but they had the luxury of LOTS MORE BITS and a faster counter. -Gary