Re: Working with Visual C++ Toolkit 2003

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"Jerry Coffin" <jcoffin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:MPG.1cd15859392efce99896ad@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
....
>
> Ah, but that was puny stuff. :-)
>
> My first serious programming was on a Control Data Cyber 170
> mainframe. Virtually _everything_ on that beast needed a fork lift to
> move at all...

Ah, but that was pretty modern and compact design.

The one I started working on as a student, was really huge and exhaled a lot
of hot air. It wasn't even using ICs, instead its brains contained 60000
discreet transistors and 170000 diodes. It had Pipelined CPU, virtual memory
addressing and paging capability, combined integer and floating point
arithmetic unit: actually, there was no specific instructions to perform
integer arithmetic. Floating point with suppressed normalization was used
for this purpose, therefore integer division was tricky. Each memory word
had two parity bits - one for each half, the combined parity for the whole
word must have been odd. Thus, the distinction between code and data was
achieved: one had the halfword parities even-odd, the other - odd-even, so
code overwriting or branches to data got caught as soon as an offending
instruction was executed. (The program had to ask the kernel to switch the
mode of the store instruction to "code" before generating executable code,
or to use a special system call, so using self-modifying code was
discouraged.) The machine had an astonishing 192KB of ferro-magnetic memory:
a few cabinets that took one room; 192KB magnetic drums, which occupied
another room, and capacious 3MB magnetic tapes. Later it also got a bunch of
magnetic disks, which looked like oversized washing machines with vertical
loading :-) The beast had a 48-bit architecture and was running of a
whopping 9MHz clock. First released in 1967. If anyone has insight, let him
figure out the name of the beast.

Gene


.

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