If you used discrete components how big would it be?

[Rod Speed]

DerolicKton <DerolicKton@myplace.net> wrote in message
news:0jp1e.13395$C7.12274@news-server.bigpond.net.au...

The mainframes were physically even bigger,
and werent anything like the horsepower of
a PC or anything like the memory either.

I thoughtmy PDP-11 was big.

Nar, they reduced the height of the cabinets for most of those.

The local council was chucking out their 11/44, with rows of CDC cartridge
pack drives as big as washing machines. Never got a bid at the auction. I
almost ended up in tears when someone was eying off the system cabinet,
decent metal doors etc, which was about to be carted up the dump. He
was considering gutting it and turning into a cubby for his kids.

Apparently the first Cray-1(1976ish i think) did about 80 megaflops/per
second. Apparently an athlon 2800 does around 670megaflops

Yeah, thats the other thing that has changed dramatically, apart from
the number of transistors used, the raw horsepower is out of sight.

The one I used before the PDP9 was a PDP8S. The S stands for serial,
serial access to the registers rather than parallel. Cycle time of 10uS.

I had that measuring light decay to the nanosecond
using a sampling cro that it was driving.

 

[quietguy]

Thats OK, just employ union guys to do the repairs - they will wait for the data
to arrive

"Michael A. Terrell" wrote:

but 4 billion transistors is going to take a lot of discrete components !

You would never get that many boards working at one time, and the
buss speed would be in the KHz range due tho the size of the system.

--
?

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

 

[Chasing Kate]

"David L. Jones" wrote:

Chasing Kate wrote:
If you were limited to only using transistors and other
standard discrete components how big would a typical
home computer be?

The Pentium 4 alone has 50+ Million transistors, not to mention support
chips. Would you like some memory with that?
You do the math...
Of course the size would depend on what package your discretes are in
and what kind of board and loading you used.
Performance could be a bit sluggish too... :-

Dave

Actually I thought about my original reply to you
and what if we included small ICS such as gates
and counters and similar logic devices into the
mixture? Would that make the computer any smaller
then if you used transistors on their own?

 

[Michael A. Terrell]

quietguy wrote:

Thats OK, just employ union guys to do the repairs - they will wait for the data
to arrive

You've never seen an early mainframe with 20 foot deep pull out
frames that were hinged at the back so you could get two rows of boards
in a 24 inch wide space or the poor uptime of those slow, slow slow
systems. The system clock was in the low KHz range and those 800 BPI 9
track tape drives were flaky as hell. Early mainframe computers were
used more for file sorting than anything else. One reel of tape had
customer records. A second drive had the day's accounts and a third
drive was the updated files.

As far as union workers, you can have all of them you can stomach.
I'll take people who are hired for their skills and work ethics any day.

--
?

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

 

[Rod Speed]

"Chasing Kate" <sittinginthepool@internode.on.net> wrote in message
news:42464D1F.D102CDE1@internode.on.net...

"David L. Jones" wrote:

Chasing Kate wrote:
If you were limited to only using transistors and other
standard discrete components how big would a typical
home computer be?

The Pentium 4 alone has 50+ Million transistors, not to mention support
chips. Would you like some memory with that?
You do the math...
Of course the size would depend on what package your discretes are in
and what kind of board and loading you used.
Performance could be a bit sluggish too... :-

Actually I thought about my original reply to you
and what if we included small ICS such as gates
and counters and similar logic devices into the
mixture? Would that make the computer any smaller
then if you used transistors on their own?

It didnt with the PDP15 which was a PDP9 done like that.

Or the 360/191 either.

It did however see the PDP11s quite a bit smaller than say the PDP15.

The PDP11 and PDP8 eventually ended up very similar
in size to a modern PC, tho with rather less memory.

 

[Rod Speed]

Wing <w@w.com> wrote in message
news:d25qjl$g8d$1@enyo.uwa.edu.au...

Rod Speed <rod_speed@yahoo.com> wrote

The discrete transistor computers mostly
didnt do it that way, they used core instead.

I've seen one of those(core memory modules) sitting in display
cabinets in the electrical department at our Uni(UWA). It is impressive
to see thousands of the little toroids threaded on equally thin wire.

Yeah, quite interesting technology.

Needed quite a bit of support transistors to drive it tho and
they were a real cow to maintain, setting the slice levels etc.

That was by far the most flakey part of the
computer proper, as opposed to the IO devices.

Real ram left it for dead maintenance wise.

The initial roms were basically big boards of discrete
diodes which you 'programmed' by cutting out the
diodes you didnt need with a pair of sidecutters.

Distinct improvement on toggling the boot loader in thru
the front panel switches tho. I used to have the PDP8
boot loader permanently engraved in my brain.

Some have been unkind enough to make snide remarks about that.

 

[Wing]

In aus.electronics Rod Speed <rod_speed@yahoo.com> wrote:

The discrete transistor computers mostly
didnt do it that way, they used core instead.

I've seen one of those(core memory modules) sitting in display cabinets in

the electrical department at our Uni(UWA). It is impressive to see
thousands of the little toroids threaded on equally thin wire.

--

Wing Wong.
Webpage: http://wing.ucc.asn.au

 

[Chasing Kate]

And whatever became of Bubble memory?

Does anyone still use it? It had great promise then
seemed to die off

 

[Chasing Kate]

Rod Speed wrote:

Wing <w@w.com> wrote in message
news:d25qjl$g8d$1@enyo.uwa.edu.au...
Rod Speed <rod_speed@yahoo.com> wrote

The discrete transistor computers mostly
didnt do it that way, they used core instead.

I've seen one of those(core memory modules) sitting in display
cabinets in the electrical department at our Uni(UWA). It is impressive
to see thousands of the little toroids threaded on equally thin wire.

Yeah, quite interesting technology.

Needed quite a bit of support transistors to drive it tho and
they were a real cow to maintain, setting the slice levels etc.

That was by far the most flakey part of the
computer proper, as opposed to the IO devices.

Real ram left it for dead maintenance wise.

The initial roms were basically big boards of discrete
diodes which you 'programmed' by cutting out the
diodes you didnt need with a pair of sidecutters.

Distinct improvement on toggling the boot loader in thru
the front panel switches tho. I used to have the PDP8
boot loader permanently engraved in my brain.

Some have been unkind enough to make snide remarks about that.

What about the stuff on here
http://www.thegalleryofoldiron.com/TCMS.HTM

They had one item which was the CPU. Basically aa layer
of ICs put onto a multi layer cake of ceramic with
connections through all of the layers which also
contained circuitry.

The whole thing would sit inside a metal case and
either be water or air cooled.


--
John

Life is short eat chocolate

 

[KLR]

On Sun, 27 Mar 2005 14:23:30 +0930, Chasing Kate
<sittinginthepool@internode.on.net> wrote:

KLR wrote:

On Sat, 26 Mar 2005 10:50:11 GMT, "Fred Ferd" <fred@ferd.com> wrote:


"MC" <MC@nonexistant.place> wrote in message
news:d2316a$mat$1@news-01.bur.connect.com.au...
Chasing Kate wrote:
If you were limited to only using transistors and other
standard discrete components how big would a typical home computer be?

Quite voluminous, with lots of cables and metal cabinets
and a heck of a power-bill and airconditioning system.

An example would be an IBM 360

http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/36091.html
http://www.thegalleryofoldiron.com/
http://homepage.virgin.net/roy.longbottom/cpumix.htm


What the ?? they dont use fully discrete circuits. They use chip ram at
least.

Ferrite toroid core memory was possibly used in that era. These could
be made into quite small sizes (though massive compared to silicon
RAM). These arrays would be driven by power transistors - though
being arranged in a matrix grid, this would drastically cut the number
or driver transistors that would have been needed.

Still have a board of it here somewhere that I never bothered to chuck
out.



Is that like a board of tiny donut rings?

I can post a pic of it for you, it came from a junked STC mainframe

that I bought cheap 20 years ago for all the parts/hardware and such,
and I kept this board for some reason

has GA 1972 on it - it appears to be a CAD designed multi layer board
that contains many heatsinked transistors and power resistors and
other ic;s, and then there is a smaller plug in PCB in the middle with
the core array on it. the cores are really too small to see with the
naked eye clearly - its just a very neat (and arty) arrangement of
very fine tinned copper wire.

I would hate to think how much this system would have sold for new in
the early 70's. specially since it all would likely have been hand
made.
--------------------------------------

The other time I have come across toroid memory (called TORMAT in this
case) is in SEEBURG brand Juke boxes. they had 200 positions (one for
each side of 100 records) and in the 50's when first used for this
purpose - were driven by vacuum tubes.

they were used well into the 1970's in these machines, but by then
were controlled by solid state circuitry. I believe in this (very
very basic) application that they were extremely reliable (and
probably light years ahead of the motorised pin-bank memory used in
the other brands).

There are still web pages around with lots of detail on how to service
and repair these tormat units - a quick google will surely reveal
detail on how these systems work and can be fixed (as the machines are
very collectable and many out there still want to keep them working)
if you have an interest in their operation.

-------------------------------------

I've seen one very briefly at a TAFE way
back in the 80s when I did a computing course.

They were teaching courses in BASIC because
at the time it seemed popular. Around 1982 /83

 

[Rod Speed]

Chasing Kate <sittinginthepool@internode.on.net> wrote in
message news:4246D004.6204AD2B@internode.on.net...

Rod Speed wrote
Wing <w@w.com> wrote
Rod Speed <rod_speed@yahoo.com> wrote

The discrete transistor computers mostly
didnt do it that way, they used core instead.

I've seen one of those(core memory modules) sitting in display
cabinets in the electrical department at our Uni(UWA). It is impressive
to see thousands of the little toroids threaded on equally thin wire.

Yeah, quite interesting technology.

Needed quite a bit of support transistors to drive it tho and
they were a real cow to maintain, setting the slice levels etc.

That was by far the most flakey part of the
computer proper, as opposed to the IO devices.

Real ram left it for dead maintenance wise.

The initial roms were basically big boards of discrete
diodes which you 'programmed' by cutting out the
diodes you didnt need with a pair of sidecutters.

Distinct improvement on toggling the boot loader in thru
the front panel switches tho. I used to have the PDP8
boot loader permanently engraved in my brain.

Some have been unkind enough to make snide remarks about that.

What about the stuff on here
http://www.thegalleryofoldiron.com/TCMS.HTM

Those were quite a bit later.

They had one item which was the CPU. Basically aa layer
of ICs put onto a multi layer cake of ceramic with connections
through all of the layers which also contained circuitry.

Yeah, similar in concept to a modern PC cpu but rather bigger.

The whole thing would sit inside a metal
case and either be water or air cooled.

Yeah, and some stuff like the 7600 were essentially
refrigerated to cool them with a similar approach.

Rather more plumbing than soldering or wire wrapping.

 

[Rod Speed]

Chasing Kate <sittinginthepool@internode.on.net> wrote in
message news:4246CDFA.B4C736DB@internode.on.net...

And whatever became of Bubble memory?

Never really did fly, like quite a bit of technology.

Does anyone still use it?

Nope.

It had great promise then seemed to die off

Yeah, too slow basically.

 

[quietguy]

Hey Michael - didn't you see that I was just having a joke? Though of course I was
having a shot at union scumbags who would be happy to sit on their bums and wait

David

"Michael A. Terrell" wrote:

quietguy wrote:

Thats OK, just employ union guys to do the repairs - they will wait for the data
to arrive

You've never seen an early mainframe with 20 foot deep pull out
frames that were hinged at the back so you could get two rows of boards
in a 24 inch wide space or the poor uptime of those slow, slow slow
systems. The system clock was in the low KHz range and those 800 BPI 9
track tape drives were flaky as hell. Early mainframe computers were
used more for file sorting than anything else. One reel of tape had
customer records. A second drive had the day's accounts and a third
drive was the updated files.

As far as union workers, you can have all of them you can stomach.
I'll take people who are hired for their skills and work ethics any day.

--
?

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

 

[quietguy]

I guess it just burst

David

Chasing Kate wrote:

And whatever became of Bubble memory?

Does anyone still use it? It had great promise then
seemed to die off

 

[Michael A. Terrell]

quietguy wrote:

Hey Michael - didn't you see that I was just having a joke? Though of course I was
having a shot at union scumbags who would be happy to sit on their bums and wait

David

Unions are a sore spot with me.

I worked at a unionized defense plant doing QA work which was a non
union job. They were talking about striking when the president of the
union told me she would slash the tires on my car if I came in to work.
I smiled and told her I would gladly run over her in the parking lot if
I saw a her with a knife, and that I was spreading the word about the
threats. Soldering was a union only job there. The production
supervisor went to my boss one night and asked if he could "Borrow" me
for an hour or so. I went to the rework area and saw the ladies trying
to solder the case of a large transformer to a circuit board used in the
PRC-77. He told me they had spent four hours trying to do the repairs.
The union steward was standing there glaring at me. I asked if I was
allowed to show them the proper way to do the job. They agreed so I did
the first one, then grinned at the production supervisor and said, I'm
only going to show them one more time as I did the second one. The
union steward tried to have me fired.


Several years later the IBEW tried to unionize the Cable TV company I
worked for. They promised me $2 an hour less than I was making, three
weeks less vacation and all for around $200 a month in dues. I told him
the owner would never allow a union, and I wasn't going to lose $4160 in
pay, pay another $2400 in dues and lose three weeks vacation that i
could sell back to the company.
--
?

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

 

[dmm]

On Mon, 28 Mar 2005 00:45:06 +0930, Chasing Kate <sittinginthepool@internode.on.net> wrote:

And whatever became of Bubble memory?

Does anyone still use it? It had great promise then
seemed to die off

That was the initial claim, but it had high power usage, was slow to write.
Then ram, rom and eprom came into the market which had lower power,
lower and single rail voltages (except for the 2708 eprom).

Are you aware of any advances in electronics in the past 20-30 years?
Have you been on a hiatus from electronics, and just come back into
the field?

 

[Michael A. Terrell]

dmm wrote:

On Mon, 28 Mar 2005 00:45:06 +0930, Chasing Kate <sittinginthepool@internode.on.net> wrote:

And whatever became of Bubble memory?

Does anyone still use it? It had great promise then
seemed to die off

That was the initial claim, but it had high power usage, was slow to write.
Then ram, rom and eprom came into the market which had lower power,
lower and single rail voltages (except for the 2708 eprom).

Are you aware of any advances in electronics in the past 20-30 years?
Have you been on a hiatus from electronics, and just come back into
the field?

I saw one TI Pro computer (Early PC clone) with bubble memory. It was
part of the billing system for a Cable TV office and was provided by the
data processing company. the bubble memory was a joke. The data entry
people would come in and turn on the computer to find out that the it
wouldn't boot. Then the data processing service would send a tech to
reload the memory and it would work for a few months, then die again.
--
?

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

 

[dmm]

On Mon, 28 Mar 2005 01:13:01 GMT, "Michael A. Terrell" <mike.terrell@earthlink.net> wrote:

dmm wrote:

On Mon, 28 Mar 2005 00:45:06 +0930, Chasing Kate <sittinginthepool@internode.on.net> wrote:

And whatever became of Bubble memory?

Does anyone still use it? It had great promise then
seemed to die off

That was the initial claim, but it had high power usage, was slow to write.
Then ram, rom and eprom came into the market which had lower power,
lower and single rail voltages (except for the 2708 eprom).

Are you aware of any advances in electronics in the past 20-30 years?
Have you been on a hiatus from electronics, and just come back into
the field?

I saw one TI Pro computer (Early PC clone) with bubble memory. It was
part of the billing system for a Cable TV office and was provided by the
data processing company. the bubble memory was a joke. The data entry
people would come in and turn on the computer to find out that the it
wouldn't boot. Then the data processing service would send a tech to
reload the memory and it would work for a few months, then die again.

I wonder if there are some bubble memory cores still available. Might
be nice to play with, just as a nostalgic thing.

 

[Michael A. Terrell]

dmm wrote:

I wonder if there are some bubble memory cores still available. Might
be nice to play with, just as a nostalgic thing.

I haven't seen one for over 20 years.

--
?

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

 

[Will S]

"Michael A. Terrell" <mike.terrell@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:42475707.CE257FD2@earthlink.net...

quietguy wrote:

Hey Michael - didn't you see that I was just having a joke? Though of
course I was
having a shot at union scumbags who would be happy to sit on their bums
and wait

David


Unions are a sore spot with me.

I worked at a unionized defense plant doing QA work which was a non
union job. They were talking about striking when the president of the
union told me she would slash the tires on my car if I came in to work.
I smiled and told her I would gladly run over her in the parking lot if
I saw a her with a knife, and that I was spreading the word about the
threats. Soldering was a union only job there. The production
supervisor went to my boss one night and asked if he could "Borrow" me
for an hour or so. I went to the rework area and saw the ladies trying
to solder the case of a large transformer to a circuit board used in the
PRC-77. He told me they had spent four hours trying to do the repairs.
The union steward was standing there glaring at me. I asked if I was
allowed to show them the proper way to do the job. They agreed so I did
the first one, then grinned at the production supervisor and said, I'm
only going to show them one more time as I did the second one. The
union steward tried to have me fired.


Several years later the IBEW tried to unionize the Cable TV company I
worked for. They promised me $2 an hour less than I was making, three
weeks less vacation and all for around $200 a month in dues. I told him
the owner would never allow a union, and I wasn't going to lose $4160 in
pay, pay another $2400 in dues and lose three weeks vacation that i
could sell back to the company.
--
?

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

Some Unions may have retards in them but if it wasn't for unions you would
be working for peanuts in conditions that you wouldn't have animals living
in. The problem is I guess that Unions have obtained as much as they are
going to get in terms of conditions for the workers and they have to change
but I would still prefer an outdated Union then none at all.

And yes you may get more money now without the union but without unions you
wouldn't be in that position. People like you are just as bad as the
unionist you describe ie. you cant see past the end of your noses