well, you know, parity is for farmers. For more good fun with SRC's arithmetic, ...

On Thu, 19 Jan 2017, Steve Johnson wrote: My memory of the Kyber (as we called them; we had a 72) was that it was not character-addressable, but 60-bit word-addressable, thus making string handling somewhat difficult. Don't get me started on its utterly broken architecture... I have thankfully lost my programming manual for the beast. Parity only slowed it down, and besides, hardware never failed... My fondest memory of the thing was its command completion; I would start to type "O, TR" and it would fill out "O, TRANSACTION TERMINAL STATUS". Which reminds me that my worst memory was its console keyboard, with "0" on the left... -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

Control Data had a lab in Mississauga On, (outside of Toronto) in the 70s and 80s where some of the CDC Cyber 180s were designed and built. A company called HCR Corp in Toronto did a considerable amount of work for CDC re-targeting pcc and UNIX System V for the 180s and ETA10. I was fortunate enough to work for both companies. I didn't work on the pcc port to the Cyber 180, but some of the UNIX port. I thought the Cyber 180 architecture was way ahead of it's time. Virtual memory, 64-bit ints, shared libraries. Some of the 180s were also dual-state, NOS/VE 64-bit OS and apps 50% of the time, a CPU microcode switch, to NOS and the 60-bit platform for 50% of the time, to support NOS to NOS/VE migration. Pcc re-targeting was challenging in a number of ways, addresses were 48 bits, with a ring and segment number, which resulted in a NULL pointer actually not being 0. HCR also did work on the ETA10 UNIX port, I didn't participate on that project, but HCR also re-targeted pcc for the Intel iWarp CPU, which I worked on. HCR had a portable global code optimizer and peephole optimizer for pcc, so much of the work involved splitting pcc, for the global optimizer, to operate between front and back ends, and integrating the peephole optimizer, re-targeting the code generator, and tuning. A lot of very smart people who were great to work with at CDC and HCR, certainly a great way to start my career. Some more background here on the CYBERs http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/cdc/cyber/cyber_180/ I seem to remember reading a number of those manuals 30 years ago or so. And info on the iWarp project: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~iwarp/ On Sat, Jan 21, 2017 at 7:51 AM, Kay Parker <kayparker(a)mailite.com> wrote:

On Sat, 21 Jan 2017, Kay Parker wrote: As I said, we called it the Kyber (as in Kyber Pass i.e. arse; you have to know Cockney rhyming slang). -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."