So many computer companies had gone bust by then that, per their own observations and the advice of the legendary Georges Doriot, "the father of venture capitalism", they changed their business plan to doing that first, and if they got enough business, to then do a computer with them. Hence the names "Digital Equipment Corporation" and "Programmed Data Processor", no "computers" here. Or indeed no mainframes or 1401 class machines.
Heh, per the Wikipedia article, they sold a lot of these to other computer companies who used them to test their own stuff. I suppose it doesn't necessarily hurt to sell shovels while you do your own gold mining.
And, yeah, I remember these IBM modules. I obtained an decimal addressed (units 0-9) very fast, like 124 inches per second 7 track IBM tape drive for a computer center. It was filled with these boring, beige cards, DEC's looked much better ^_^.
Hmmm, and the PDP-6 was a ... less than stellar success because it's CPU wasn't made with these in the old fashioned way and was very hard to maintain (see this PC board: http://ljkrakauer.com/LJK/essays/pdp6plaque.jpg). Something they corrected with the first PDP-10, the KA-10, which used diode-transistor logic and huge wire wrapped backplanes.
An amusing story about DEC's cards from Grant Saviers:
At DEC "deep sixing" NTF cards had real meaning. Since the mill [that held DEC] had a mill pond, NTF repeat cards would often take flight out an open window into the pond. Probably thousands of them there as Ken Olsen wrote a memo that was posted along those windows, "Any employee who throws modules out the windows will be summarily dismissed."
[NTF is "No Trouble Found", indicating a card that was returned as defective, but worked fine when tested. If this keeps happening, destroying the card would be very tempting. Compare with analog IC genius Bob Widlar, who would "Widlarize" offending parts by pounding them to dust with a hammer: http://hackaday.com/2014/04/08/heroes-of-hardware-revolution...]
Pictures three and four explain why so many sci-fi megaputers have drawers full of cards^H^H^H^H^Hchips^H^H^H^H^Hcrystals that can be pulled out and swapped around in order to fix a broken AI or something.
"Information on particular SMS cards is surprisingly hard to find, so I made a database of SMS cards, collecting information on 900 different cards. Given the historical importance of SMS cards, I think information on this technology should be preserved. "
I often wonder what motivates someone to spend the time to do something like this. Extremely time consuming and with no obvious market for the information relative to the time of "collecting information on 900 different cards". By "market" I'm not saying "way to profit". How many people are actually interested or need this?
There are people who collect butterflies, birds, and beetles. There are people who research the genealogy of people who lived in a specific small town in the US 100 years ago. There are people who memorize the statistics of major league baseball players. There are people who travel to places to experience solar eclipses, and do so dozens of times. People who research stamps produced by Weimar Germany. People who fix antique tractors, go to antique tractor fairs, and subscribe to magazines on the topic. There are people who run a marathon in every state of the US, or play golf at every course in Scotland. There are people who collect license plates, and will go to license plate swap meetings, and people who collect cans, and spark plugs. (Collectors of the last were handy in identifying the Coso artifact as a 1920s Champion spark plug.)
I can easily continue. Do you wonder what specifically motivates someone to research SMS cards but not wonder about all of these other interests? Or is it the entire concept of non-profitable interests which throws you for a loop?
Back in the 70's many of us scavenged our first Transistors from surplus computer cards. We went to great trouble to catalog the different boards so we could know what we were getting.
I personally like any 'old' computer information; I read magazines/books from the 60s/70s/80s (it starts to get boring after 1993 or something when the nice computers mostly made way for boring PCs that were hard to understand all the hardware and software off from the lowest hardware level to the top OS/user software). I think there are many people who are interested in this information; obviously not millions but enough to keep a lot this kind of information gathering going. Must say that I too find this information should be collected somehow, because if it disappears (which it kind of did do already apparently), we lose a bit of the fundamental starters of what became computers everywhere and the internet.
I've been sort of a computer history enthusiast lately. Read about 7 books in the last few months. I found this read very interesting. Always wondered how these where built inside.
SLT is an interesting technology since it falls in between discrete transistors and integrated circuits. IBM's SLT hybrid modules were metal packages 12mm on a side. Inside a module they put a few separate semiconductor dies (transistors and diodes) and precision-trimmed thick-film resistors on a tiny circuit board. It's like an integrated circuit on the outside but separate components on the inside.
For a while, IBM built SMS cards that used SLT modules in place of the discrete resistors and diodes. They needed to keep the discrete germanium transistors though because the SLT modules were silicon-based. A picture of one of these SMS cards is here: http://righto.com/sms/DGW.html The result is extremely space-inefficient, but it was a cheaper way of building backwards-compatible cards.
[+] [-] hga|11 years ago|reply
So many computer companies had gone bust by then that, per their own observations and the advice of the legendary Georges Doriot, "the father of venture capitalism", they changed their business plan to doing that first, and if they got enough business, to then do a computer with them. Hence the names "Digital Equipment Corporation" and "Programmed Data Processor", no "computers" here. Or indeed no mainframes or 1401 class machines.
Heh, per the Wikipedia article, they sold a lot of these to other computer companies who used them to test their own stuff. I suppose it doesn't necessarily hurt to sell shovels while you do your own gold mining.
And, yeah, I remember these IBM modules. I obtained an decimal addressed (units 0-9) very fast, like 124 inches per second 7 track IBM tape drive for a computer center. It was filled with these boring, beige cards, DEC's looked much better ^_^.
Hmmm, and the PDP-6 was a ... less than stellar success because it's CPU wasn't made with these in the old fashioned way and was very hard to maintain (see this PC board: http://ljkrakauer.com/LJK/essays/pdp6plaque.jpg). Something they corrected with the first PDP-10, the KA-10, which used diode-transistor logic and huge wire wrapped backplanes.
[+] [-] kens|11 years ago|reply
At DEC "deep sixing" NTF cards had real meaning. Since the mill [that held DEC] had a mill pond, NTF repeat cards would often take flight out an open window into the pond. Probably thousands of them there as Ken Olsen wrote a memo that was posted along those windows, "Any employee who throws modules out the windows will be summarily dismissed."
[NTF is "No Trouble Found", indicating a card that was returned as defective, but worked fine when tested. If this keeps happening, destroying the card would be very tempting. Compare with analog IC genius Bob Widlar, who would "Widlarize" offending parts by pounding them to dust with a hammer: http://hackaday.com/2014/04/08/heroes-of-hardware-revolution...]
[+] [-] xenophonf|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dalke|11 years ago|reply
I thought there was a similar style in Star Trek: The Original Series, but while they had card-loaded computers, it wasn't as an array of cards. Their hardware idiom is more like http://tosgraphics.yuku.com/topic/409/The-Type7-Console-Comp...
ST:TNG has an example at http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/memoryalpha/images/b/bd/... but I suspect it was more directly derived from HAL than a 1960s era computer.
[+] [-] larrys|11 years ago|reply
I often wonder what motivates someone to spend the time to do something like this. Extremely time consuming and with no obvious market for the information relative to the time of "collecting information on 900 different cards". By "market" I'm not saying "way to profit". How many people are actually interested or need this?
I mean, look at this:
http://files.righto.com/sms/
[+] [-] dalke|11 years ago|reply
I can easily continue. Do you wonder what specifically motivates someone to research SMS cards but not wonder about all of these other interests? Or is it the entire concept of non-profitable interests which throws you for a loop?
[+] [-] Johnythree|11 years ago|reply
see the old EEB magazine at: http://www.rochester-engineering.com/EEB/
[+] [-] tluyben2|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tr352|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rasz_pl|11 years ago|reply
http://lygte-info.dk/
:)
[+] [-] abe_duarte|11 years ago|reply
It seems IBM replaced this technology with SLT in 1964, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Solid_Logic_Technology .
[+] [-] kens|11 years ago|reply
For a while, IBM built SMS cards that used SLT modules in place of the discrete resistors and diodes. They needed to keep the discrete germanium transistors though because the SLT modules were silicon-based. A picture of one of these SMS cards is here: http://righto.com/sms/DGW.html The result is extremely space-inefficient, but it was a cheaper way of building backwards-compatible cards.