From: Prof Karl Kleine Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: Blinkenlights Date: 11 Aug 2001 23:09:55 GMT Organization: Fachhochschule Jena, Germany Lines: 47 Message-ID: <9l4e03$9ej$2@beta.szi.fh-jena.de> References: NNTP-Posting-Host: hoare.gw.fh-jena.de X-Trace: beta.szi.fh-jena.de 997571395 9683 194.94.38.12 (11 Aug 2001 23:09:55 GMT) X-Complaints-To: news@beta.szi.fh-jena.de NNTP-Posting-Date: 11 Aug 2001 23:09:55 GMT User-Agent: tin/1.4.2-20000205 ("Possession") (UNIX) (Linux/2.2.16 (i686)) Sergej Roytman wrote: > A naive question. What did the blinkenlights on the old iron that had > them, show? I had always assumed that they were tied to the machine's > data- and address busses (with appropriate buffering), but then the > things would be useless much of the time. On the other hand, the BLs > [........ deleted .....] Story #2: crash analysis by Polaroid photo for Telefunken TR440 As a student of electrical engineering in the begin of the 70ies at Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum, Germany, I had a student job in one of the workshops of the university. As I also had some aquaintance with the people and the machines at the computing center I got the job of constructing and building a very special tripod for a Polaroid camera: Upon a machine crash (or upon seeing a very peculiar pattern) the operator would grab the camera with the attached tripod, hook the rubber feet into the corners of the blinkenlights console (everything was made to measure and fixed) and take a shnapshot. Yes, that was a real snapshot of the machine state, with instruction register, instruction address, the user registers, flags, etc. After that, reboot. The trick was to have a camera position slightly off center, as to eliminated / minimize reflections of various lights in the room, and at the same time get a good rendering of the on/off state of the blinkenlights. The second issue was that the whole camera / tripod assembly was fixed and that it lay in some corner of the room in a cabinet, no adjustments to be made, just pressing the shutter release for the operator and taking out the Polaroid. The TR440 will be unknown to most readers here. It was a German mainframe for scientific calculation, of which about 40 to 60 machines were built und mostly used in universities and research facilities under heavy grants from the German government to have a national computing force. Some of it's software was actually rather advanced for the late 60ies / early 70ies, and I only found some of the facilities again a decade later with VAX/VMS. The machine itself is forgotten today; I found just one picture of it on the web, but no technical information online. I only have a minimal collection of printed material like the instruction set summary. That branch of Telefunken was later bought by Nixdorf and that in turn by Siemens. So there's nothing left :-(. __________________________________________________________________ Prof. Karl Kleine http://www.fh-jena.de/~kleine Fachhochschule Jena kle...@fh-jena.de PF 100314, D-07703 Jena, Germany +49-3641-205-502 [fax -503] -- From: Prof Karl Kleine Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: Multipass Algol compiler, (D. Gries) Date: 13 Nov 2001 22:29:36 GMT Organization: Fachhochschule Jena, Germany Lines: 43 Message-ID: <9ss6sg$ici$1@beta.szi.fh-jena.de> References: <9slogb$smt$1@freenet9.carleton.ca> <20011111143234.4c5b9f3f.steveo@eircom.net> <3BEE9733.72DD5AB9@yahoo.com> <20011111175132.34ac8eab.steveo@eircom.net> <3BEFF1D5.69182038@earthlink.net> <20011112190521.170b029c.steveo@eircom.net> <3BF13A37.E1120B82@earthlink.net> <20011113205227.026e1a9f.steveo@eircom.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: hoare.gw.fh-jena.de X-Trace: beta.szi.fh-jena.de 1005690576 18834 194.94.38.12 (13 Nov 2001 22:29:36 GMT) X-Complaints-To: news@beta.szi.fh-jena.de NNTP-Posting-Date: 13 Nov 2001 22:29:36 GMT User-Agent: tin/1.4.2-20000205 ("Possession") (UNIX) (Linux/2.2.16 (i686)) Steve O'Hara-Smith wrote: [.........] > Eeek, I hadn't realised it was quite *that* chaotic. Now I'll > stick my neck out and guess that some of the popular 'strange' sizes > were used for several different reasons in several different ways (like > 45 bits could be 9+12+12+12 and 9+36 float *or* sign and 11 BCD but perhaps > not often on the same machine). The German Telefunken TR440 mainframe, built in the 70ies (+-), had a payload wordlength of 48 bits, plus 2 bits typecode, plus 2 bits error detection/correction (Dreierprobe). Total wordlength thus 52 bits. It was an accumulator machine with 3 more 48 bit registers, and a somewhat weird index register structure, which I do no recall in detail right now. Have to look at the few remnant docs at home. The possible type codes were - 48 bit int - 48 bit float (have to check for mantissa / exponent layout) - instruction (two 24 bit instructions in a word) - other, which usually meant 6 8 bit bytes. Addresses were word addresses. AFAIK all of these beasts are out of commission now and there is nearly nothing left w.r.t. documentation. The TR440 was an attempt to start a German national computer line for scientific computing. It was a project heavily subsidized by grants to universities to buy one of these (instead of a CDC or IBM). One of those days I will scan what I still have (Grosse Befehlsliste, an A4 format booklet with all the instructions and their effects described in a brief format.) and a few other such things, and make that available. Karl Kleine PS: Back to the title of the tread: All compilers from the 60ies and 70ies had a significant number of passes. That is, production quality compilers. There were of course a number of compile-load-and-go systems that tried to minimize that, mainly for student job batches, where each compilation was just a few cards (typically less than a page of text, and definitely less than say 20 pages of listing, which roughly translates to <1000 lines.) There are a number of techniques which I consider more or less forgotten these days, as new people in the field (euphemism for 'the youngsters') simple do not have to cope with tight memory budgets.\ -- From: Bernd.Oppol...@T-ONLINE.DE (Bernd Oppolzer) Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main Subject: Re: How Long have you worked with MF's ? (poll) - OT ? Date: 17 Apr 2002 15:07:52 -0700 Organization: None Lines: 39 Message-ID: <02041800064100.00597@opp1> References: <003201c1e657$11abcea0$0900a8c0@transnote> Reply-To: IBM Mainframe Discussion List NNTP-Posting-Host: opp1 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit NNTP-Posting-Date: 17 Apr 2002 22:07:52 GMT For me, it would be interesting, if machines other than IBM's count also. I worked with a machine called Telefunken TR 440 since 1977 and switched to IBM's in 1985. The TR 440 was a machine with a main storage consisting of 192 k words of 48 bits. It hat four 48 bit registers and some 24 bit registers. It also had a very rich instruction set including stack instructions. It was build by Telefunken AG in Germany in the late 60s/early 70s, but only 50 boxes were shipped. The operating system had more features than any other system at that time, including IBM's. There were compilers for FORTRAN, ALGOL, COBOL, PL/1, PASCAL and other languages. The PL/1 compiler was a port from the Multics PL/1 compiler, see the Multics websites. It had very good optimization features. I remember that the PL/1 compiler computed the result of the following loop completely at compile time; at run time only the result was written. SUM = 0; DO I = 1 TO 100000; SUM = SUM + I; END; PUT SKIP LIST (SUM); A real "optimizing compiler". Unfortunatly, the machine had no offspring, because it was compatible to nothing else in all aspects. Would you consider this a mainframe ? In my opinion, it was. Regards Bernd -- From: Reynir Stef‡nsson Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: AEG-Telefunken TR 440 Date: Sun, 05 Sep 2004 02:12:02 +0000 Organization: Siminn - Iceland Telecom - Internet News Lines: 46 Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: ppp163-170.as.mi.is Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: news.simnet.is 1094350307 10865 217.151.163.170 (5 Sep 2004 02:11:47 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet-abuse@simnet.is NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 5 Sep 2004 02:11:47 +0000 (UTC) X-Newsreader: Forte Free Agent 1.93/32.576 English (American) Quite a while ago I came across a text file with the name tr440.txt. It turned out to be an OCRed scan of a brochure from ca. 1970 describing a German computer, the AEG-Telefunken TR 440. Here is a condensation of the text that even JPEG would call cruddy. It was a 3rd gen. 48-bitter, sold for scientific and commercial purposes alike. With 256KW of interleaved fast core, it ran at about 6-7 MIPS. In addition, it could take up to 2MW of slow core. There are six arith. registers mentioned: Accumulator (A), secondary acc. (H), quotient (Q), multiplier (D), shift counter (Y) and flag register (M). I/O: 1-4 fast (3MBps) channel processors and 4-12 regular (0.7MBps) CPs. The fast ones had a single interface for disk or (pseudo)drum. The regular ones had four interfaces each. FEP: TR 86. 24 bits, 32-64KW core, 0.5 MIPS. I/O devices mentioned: SIG 100 graphical terminal SIG 50 terminal FSR 105 teletype TSP 100 'drum' PSP 600 disk (fixed) WSP 414 disk (removable) MDS 252 tape (800bpi) MDS 254 tape (1600bpi) LKL 720 card reader (1200 cards per minute) LKS 145 card punch (250 cards per minute) LSL 195 tape reader (2000 cps) LSS 150 tape punch (150 cps) SDR 176-1 line printer (upper case) SDR 176-2 line printer (upper/lower case) ZCH 230-233 plotter OS: BS3. Batch and time-sharing. Languages: TAS (macro assembler) FORTRAN, ALGOL 60, COBOL 68, HPG (or RPG if OCR error), BASIC, BCPL. Applications: GPSS (simulator), DBS (database), PPS (planning and production control). -- Reynir Stef‡nsson (reyni...@mi.is)