Steve Horejsi <shorejsi at skypoint.com> writes: > OK, can't resist the urge to swap old computer stories any longer. > > I used one of the same 1620 machines that Dave referred to. The 1620 > could add in hardware but not multiply; that was in > software. Depending on the language (no resident OS on these > things...), this could very well be a lookup table in memory. An > errant program could easily overwrite this table, temporarily altering > the local space-time continuum. 6 X 9 = 42 was well within the realm > of possibility on these occasions. The plotting package they wrote for the one at Carleton deliberately altered those tables to implement rotation of the figure being plotted. (The plotter was a Calcomp pen plotter, driven by a homebrew interface that connected to the paper tape outputs.) The one at Carleton also had the floating point hardware (optional). > Also worked on the System/36. Each machine had two processors, of > differing architecture and instruction sets. The CSP (Control Store > Processor) did most of the I/O and low-level stuff. The MSP (Main > Store Processor) ran the System/3 instruction set. Oh, man, that was a weird system. So weird I heard about it even though I never worked anywhere near it. -- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b at dd-b.net / Ghugle: the Fannish Ghod of Queries Book log: http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/Ouroboros/booknotes/ Photos: http://dd-b.lighthunters.net/