Call for manuals and maybe floppies: IBM 8100
Jay Jaeger
cube1 at charter.net
Sat Aug 28 14:11:07 CDT 2021
On 8/26/2021 7:54 PM, Paul Berger via cctalk wrote:
>
> On 2021-08-26 6:48 p.m., Jay Jaeger via cctech wrote:
>> My next project once I finish my IBM 1410 FPGA implementation (so, a
>> couple of years out, probably) would be to write an emulator for the
>> boat anchor known as the IBM 8100. I had exposure to these things
>> back in the 1980s. The project was not really a success: the DPPX
>> operating system was way overkill for the underpowered machine, and
>> wasn't reliable enough or capable enough to run them at remote
>> locations with central administration.
>>
>> The machine had some fairly sophisticated features:
>> Two groups of 64 sets of registers with 8 32 bit registers each
>> Auto increment and auto decrement indexed addressing
>> Address translation - but not paging
>> A primitive form of I/O channel
>>
>>
>> True story: The early releases of DPPX were just awful buggy. We
>> ended up dedicating 3 conference rooms (with the dividers open) for a
>> "warm room" for something like 3 months, housing our personnel and IBM
>> personnel up from Texas. At one point one of the IBM'ers was
>> overheard on a public phone in the hallway of our public building
>> telling someone he was there "to help the hicks from Wisconsin". That
>> got reported to our management and to IBM's management, and he was on
>> the next flight back to Texas. ;)
>>
>> On the flip side, I was testing database recovery (it was my thing,
>> back in the day - though we did not end up using the database /
>> transaction manager). I found some bugs in the database log journal
>> recovery process. I mentioned it to one of the IBM'ers in passing,
>> also pointing out it wasn't urgent since we were not going to use DTMS
>> anyway, at least not soon. He pretty much begged me to report it -
>> and anything else I found wrong. Completely polar opposite attitude
>> of the guy in the previous paragraph.
>>
>> JRJ
>
> The 8100 came out during my first stint in field service, most of the
> machines we saw where 8130s that ran the DPCX operating system and they
> where purchased to replace 3790 distributed processors. We had one
> customer who bought an 8140 and I helped with a model upgrade on it,
> which involved removing all the logic gates as one unit and replacing
> them with the upgraded one. It would have been quicker and probably
> cheaper to ship an entire new machine, but they where advertised as
> field upgradeable so..... A few years later when I saw the inside of a
> S/38 I recognized the packaging of the system as being identical to the
> 8140 except the 8140 did not have the built in CRT console or magazine
> diskette drive. This 8140 was running DPPX but I don't know how the
> customer got on with it as it was not my account. It is said that the
> 8100 processor is the Universal Controller (UC), but I am hoping it was
> a beefed up on from the UC engine that ran several of the "Industry
> Systems" controllers such as 3274 (NDS), 3601 (Banking), and 3651
> (retail store systems).
>
> Paul.
>
>
I had a look at the UC information on
bitsavers.org/pdf/IBM/microcontrollers, and also looked at some field
service material available on archive.org.
The CPU comprises several boards, so it wasn't UC per se. There was a
ROS-driven micro controller that handled instruction fetch and
branching, but it had 56 bit words per that field service material.
It may have had a similar software architecture to the UCs, but at
present from what I have seen the similarity seems to end their.
JRJ
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