How were 32-bit minis built in the 70s/80?

[Charles Dickman]

On Sat, May 11, 2019 at 8:50 PM Steve Malikoff via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:

> I could be remembering incorrectly but I think the Gould PN6080 mini we
> had exclusively for third year
> comp sci at Macquarie Uni in the mid/late 80s was 32-bit made up of
> AMD2900 family logic (2901 ALU's).
>

Purdue EE had I think 2 Gould PowerNode 9080s. I don't know anything about
the internals, but Purdue EE was doing development or testing for them. It
might have been a port of 4.3 BSD. As an undergraduate you could get an
account on en.ecn.purdue.edu for the asking and it was significantly faster
than the overloaded Dual VAXen. It also crashed from time to time.

-chuck