[TUHS] More Spider

[Jon Steinhart]

Ken Thompson via TUHS writes:
>
> the pierce loop had its own protocol  on its own wire.
> that meant it could only be local-area. the PL was
> in operation on a packard-bell 516 when i arrived
> at the labs in june '66. carl christensen was the
> software person for both the loop and the 516.
> i assume that pierce and condon were the hw
> guys, but that was before my time.
>
> spider was similar, but was designed to run on
> the standard telephone T1 lines. thus, the whole
> idea was more wide-area. the major draw back
> of spider, and probably the reason it was never
> really used, was that it couldnt make a connection.
> all connections were pre-created at boot time.
> a lesser reason was that the controller was a
> tempo computer that no one loved. the system
> software sucked. quickly it became unmaintained.
> i think tempo went out of business. anyway, the
> spider controller was the first and only tempo
> computer that i saw or even heard of.

Oh wow, that jogs loose some more stray memory cells.  Found the Tempo
manual on-line which had a front panel picture.  There was one of these
sitting in a rack near the window in the 516 lab back when we were in
building 2.  Not sure if it ever made it to building 7, might have been
tossed.  This thing a telephone handset hanging off of it.

Nice to see the networked IC test system that I mentioned the other day
in the datamation article on page 52.  It was on the loop, not the spider,
when I worked on it.

Jon