Gould 32/77 (was: NWA auctions)

[Rick Bensene]

-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Tony Aiuto
Sent: Friday, October 14, 2016 7:29 PM
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
Subject: Re: Gould 32/77 (was: NWA auctions)

I used most of the SEL/Gould/Encore machines.  The 32/77 was an original SEL design, from before Gould bought them. It ran MPX-32, their real-time OS. TTL based. The 32/87 was ECL, in a much bigger cabinet. They made slight hardware changes to the 32/77 and 32/75 and released them as the PowerNode PN7000 and PN5000, which ran UTX-32, their Unix port. IIRC, we took a few 77's and changed one board in the chassis to turn them into PowerNodes.

The instruction set was more RISC-y than CISC-y. The floating point was base 16 exponent rather than base 2. Because of the way they did normalization, there were a lot of bit patterns which were impossible results. I made a lot of use of those to represent special values.

I'm glad it was saved.

Bob: I may have a lot of software for it, if I can find the tapes and they are still readable. I even got hold of their secret C compiler port.



On Fri, Oct 14, 2016 at 8:43 AM, Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote:

> I have been given an lot of SEL software and documentation, along with 
> a simulator Now, I need to get off my butt and put it all on line.
>
> Thank you for saving the system, Bob.
>
> On 10/13/16 8:34 PM, Bob Rosenbloom wrote:
> > On 10/13/2016 9:01 AM, Rick Bensene wrote:
> >>> I'm curious what the Systems 32/77 is..
> >>> Wasn't Gould SEL?  maybe an SEL system?
> >>
> >> The 32/77-series was a 32-bit machine implemented in ECL, based on 
> >> earlier SEL designs, but is definitely Gould in design/manufacture.
> >>
> >> Some of the machines in the series had a very powerful (for the 
> >> time) floating point unit (known as the IPU) that operated in 
> >> tandem with the main CPU that vastly increased the number-crunching 
> >> power available
> >>
> >> The machines were mainly intended for real-time control 
> >> applications (as used in the flight sim applications in the 
> >> auction)
> >>
> >> The machine ran a real-time executive called MPX-32.
> >>
> >> More information: http://www.encore-support.com/htmls/32_77.htm
> >>
> >> Years ago, I had some experience with these machines.  They were 
> >> quite powerful for their time, and were also workhorses that just ran and ran.
> >> Very robust design.
> >>
> >> These are neat machines, and I hope that they end up in the hands 
> >> of someone that can care for them rather than ending up scrap.
> >>
> >> --
> >> Rick Bensene
> >> The Old Calculator Museum
> >> http://oldcalculatormuseum.com
> >>
> >
> >
> > Well... with a momentary lapse of reason, I bought the Gould / SEL
> system. It won't go to scrap.
> > No idea how I'm going to get it, and what I'm going to do with it, 
> > but
> after reading about it last night,
> > I thought it might be fun to play with. We'll see...
> >
> >
> > Bob
> >
> >
> >
>
>