[TriLUG] Old Guy Stories

[Len Boyle]

Xerox used the PDP11's to control their large data center printer's. 
The printers would take input from an mainframe over an i/o channel (parallel i/o bus that ran between i/o devices and was controlled by a special cpu that did i/o only and shared main memory with the main cpu's). And it could take input over an Ethernet card. 

-----Original Message-----
From: trilug-bounces at trilug.org [mailto:trilug-bounces at trilug.org] On Behalf Of Kevin Flanagan
Sent: Sunday, February 11, 2007 5:06 PM
To: Triangle Linux Users Group discussion list
Subject: Re: [TriLUG] Old Guy Stories

The desk mounting sounds like the PDPs as well.  I didn't work with them, but did see some in a DEC facility where I worked.  They had bit of a museum in the lobby, it was the "Benchmark Center", where customers and partners were brought in to run benchmarks on their production stuff.  This place had a block of the original "Whirlwind" as well.  
Last I knew (it's been a while) there were a bunch of PDPs still in use doing device control, one was the control for opening and closing the Cape Cod Canal drawbridge.  Back when they started making VAX clusters, they found a use for old PDP chips, storage controllers.  The thing called an HSC, Hierarchal Storage Controller, was a PDP11 on a card with I/O cards for disks, tapes and Cluster Interconnect.

Some of that design has advantages over stuff we do today for shared storage.


Kevin


Paul Jones wrote:
> about pdp's 
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-8
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-11
>
> both fit your word sizes and the paper tape and my memory. check out the 
> pictures and write ups
>
> ==========================================================================
>                              Paul Jones
>  "Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation." Alasdair Gray
>                 http://www.ibiblio.org/pjones/blog/
>   pjones at ibiblio.org   voice: (919) 962-7600     fax: (919) 962-8071
> ===========================================================================
>   
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