Gould 32/77 (was: NWA auctions)

[Bob Rosenbloom]

On 10/14/2016 7:29 PM, Tony Aiuto wrote:
> 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.

That's great! Might actually end up being a useful system. It will be 
interesting to see if any
peripherals are in the cabinets. Are they multiprocessor capable? The 
photos had two
control panels on one of the cabinets implying two systems, or two CPU's 
in the cabinet.

Bob

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