Gould 32/77 (was: NWA auctions)

[David Brownlee]

On 15 October 2016 at 03:29, Tony Aiuto <tony.aiuto at gmail.com> 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.
>

Random Gould side reference.

We had a PN9080 and PN6040 at City University as the main systems in the
late 90's (accessed via the usual mix of ADM3As, ADM5s, some Sun3s and a
whole bunch of Whitechapel MG-1s, ans some colour terminals of which I
cannot recall the name, but I remember them having a setting where they
would auto colour characters based on their clas - alpha one colour,
numbers another, and two or three other colours for the rest of ASCII)

I remember looking at the filesystem and thinking "Mmm, on disk formats
with 32 bit timestamps but with padding ready to be taken to 64 bit when
needed, nice future proofing".

When the CS department finally moved away from their own 6040 it was left
forgotten in a room over the summer - in the autumn the aircon was found to
have failed, overflowed and the machine was sitting there with water all
over the floor and in a steam bath. Still running fine. Quite robust that
ECL :)