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The story went, some guys at Honeywell on Multics went to management and said, "We believe that we can bring up Multics on a super mini computer, sell it, and

by graycat 12y ago

The story went, some guys at Honeywell on Multics went to management and said, "We believe that we can bring up Multics on a super mini computer, sell it, and make money." and management said, "We don't believe you can bring up a Multics on a super mini computer; if you did, it wouldn't sell; even if it did, you wouldn't make any money.". So, those guys did Prime. The OS was written in a slightly tweaked Fortran. I ran two of them and did my dissertation computing on one of them. For the first one, we were doing some DoD analytical work on TSO, and our two programmers were spending $80 K a year. We got a Prime for $120 K, and our computer usage went through the roof. We just copied over our 500 K TSO Fortran programs, compiled, and ran -- ran fine. That Prime was just for our group of 40, but soon the company of 300 wanted one, and I served on the selection committee. For the second one, I got that for a B-school as a prof. There the Prime made the central computer group's Amdahl 470/V6 look silly, and I served on the committee to select a new university CIO. At one time I had a summer job, and at first I was to program an 1130, but later the job was for me to design and build some DC power supplies to power some IBM tape drives IBM had given away to a research lab.

hga 12y ago
Software Arts, as in Visicalc, used Prime computers. I see from a biography of Dan Bricklin, the less technical of the two, that: Prior to forming Software Arts, he had been a market researcher for Prime Computer Inc., a senior systems programmer for FasFax Corporation, and a senior software engineer for Digital Equipment Corporation. At Digital, he was project leader of the WPS-8 word processing software, where he helped to specify and develop one of the first standalone word processing systems. And the more technical partner Bob Frankston was an MIT type. I remember one Software Arts employee, friend of one or more, or maybe Bob's youngest brother, who was a friend of mine, mention that among other things they appreciated what the system adopted from Multics. Being bit-sliced, the Prime micro-architecture you mention was microcoded, which of course would fit with their following the example of the successful System 360, many models of which had to be microcoded because the logic family they used pretty much had only one speed, they made micro-architectures narrower, down to 8 bits as I recall, for the slower machines, and the 2? fastest had none. Honeywell's rejection of microcoding helped made Multics and GECOS systems terribly uncompetitive, at least by the time Visicalc was being developed, although the macro-architecture allowed you to easily hook up 6 CPUs in one system (and 8 with a horrible kludge, as I recall).

by graycat 12y ago

hga 12y ago

Software Arts, as in Visicalc, used Prime computers. I see from a biography of Dan Bricklin, the less technical of the two, that: Prior to forming Software Arts, he had been a market researcher for Prime Computer Inc., a senior systems programmer for FasFax Corporation, and a senior software engineer for Digital Equipment Corporation. At Digital, he was project leader of the WPS-8 word processing software, where he helped to specify and develop one of the first standalone word processing systems. And the more technical partner Bob Frankston was an MIT type. I remember one Software Arts employee, friend of one or more, or maybe Bob's youngest brother, who was a friend of mine, mention that among other things they appreciated what the system adopted from Multics. Being bit-sliced, the Prime micro-architecture you mention was microcoded, which of course would fit with their following the example of the successful System 360, many models of which had to be microcoded because the logic family they used pretty much had only one speed, they made micro-architectures narrower, down to 8 bits as I recall, for the slower machines, and the 2? fastest had none. Honeywell's rejection of microcoding helped made Multics and GECOS systems terribly uncompetitive, at least by the time Visicalc was being developed, although the macro-architecture allowed you to easily hook up 6 CPUs in one system (and 8 with a horrible kludge, as I recall).