seeking Burroughs B6700 manuals and software

COURYHOUSE at aol.com COURYHOUSE at aol.com
Sat Sep 5 01:58:09 CDT 2015


one thing we  have  fine  from the 5000 stuff are all these  beautiful  
cord wood  logic  things  all gold and  pretty   but  most of these  got   
scrapped     for  gold along the  way..  I do  not  know what other units used 
in  but  some   folks   mentioned  5000
I have  schematics  for  some of these too.
 
ed#  www,smecc.org
 
 
 
 
In a message dated 9/4/2015 11:23:16 P.M. Mountain Standard Time,  
nw at retroComputingTasmania.com writes:

We would  be glad to hear from anyone who might have new material
related to the  Burroughs B6700.

We're on the hunt for any manuals or software related  to the Burroughs
large systems so we can build an emulator for the B6700.  This search
includes the B5000, B6000, B7000 families, since there is  considerable
overlap across these families and collateral from one system  family
can assist understanding another. Example models include B5500,  B5700,
B6500, B7500, B6700, B7700, B6800, and B7800.

We were  amazingly lucky with the B5500 to have so much of the  critical
documentation (thanks Bitsavers!) and a complete suite of  system
software, but even though the B6700 was more recent and produced  in
larger numbers we're not having the same level of good fortune  finding
artifacts.

What we have so far is documented  here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JnMsyE8ssJi_-MUsK0rT9LPtNpeJCpTv1QrF
w-917Y8/edit?usp=sharing

If  you're interested in this system then you likely remember that it
had a  particularly impressive front-panel display, seen  here:

http://www.retrocomputingtasmania.com/home/projects/burroughs-b6700-mainfram
e#TOC-B6700-Display-Panel

This  was known as the MDL display: Maintenance Diagnostics Logic
display.  Because the MDL had the 4 x top-of-stack registers down to
the bit-level  particular bit-patterns allowed words to be displayed.
The early MCPs put  IDLE into the display during IO waits, and
subsequent releases: B for  Burroughs, but sites quickly started
putting their own company initials or  the time.

The Danish museum is so far the only place I've found that  kept the  MDL:

http://datamuseum.dk/wiki/Genstand:11000045_Konsolpanel_Burroughs_B6700

Thanks  to Finn Verner Nielsen for being so helpful and undertaking an
expedition  into their warehouse to locate and photograph the item for
us. On that DDHF  web-page you will see on the left of the picture the
B7800 MDL they have  too.

My goal is to also construct a replica of the B6700  MDL.


Steps undertaken so far:
Posts to newsgroups
Posts on  LinkedIn, wikipedia, Yahoo groups
Emails to a few dozen people who were  involved with the system
Trawling the  Internet



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