AB 7320 was: Re: What's the rarest or most unusual computer-related item do you own?

[Jon Elson]

On 01/11/2017 11:11 PM, Bob Rosenbloom wrote:
> On 1/11/2017 8:45 PM, Jon Elson wrote:
>> I also have an Allen-Bradley 7320, a CNC machine tool 
>> control.  The heart of it is a 7300 "industrial 
>> processor" 16-bit minicomputer. I used it for a year or 
>> so to run a retrofitted Bridgeport milling machine, but 
>> got tired of it breaking down, which it did fairly 
>> often.  Once I got EMC from NIST running, the A-B was 
>> turned off for good.
>>
>> http://pico-systems.com/images/S_AB7320D.jpg
>>
>> Jon
>>
>
> I have one of the AB processor units from a 7320 system. 
> The 3264 Industrial Processor. I have spare boards and 
> front panels also.
> Was there ever any general purpose software available for 
> it? BASIC, FORTRAN, assembler/editor/linker stuff? It 
> would be fun to
> get it running if there was something fun it could be used 
> for.
>
> Bob
>
>
I quite doubt it.  I suspect it was also used in places 
where today you'd use a PLC, controlling various industrial 
processes.  It has a board that interfaces to I/O racks that 
can take 8 I/O modules, and you can have several of these 
racks per interface.  I have digital inputs and outputs, 
encoder counters and D/A converters, but I think there were 
a bunch of different types of modules available.

I would GUESS they did software development on some general 
purpose computer, but really have no idea.  Their mini 
certainly COULD have had assemblers, linkers and such for 
in-house use.  Maybe the industrial control guys used 
software like that to set up the processes.

Jon