[TUHS] CCI POWER 6/32 | Harris HCX-[579] | Unisys 7000/40

[William H. Mitchell via TUHS]

We took a pretty close look at the CCI 6/32 vs. the VAX 8600 as a main departmental machine for U of Arizona CS in 1984 or so. I remember then-department head Dave Hanson saying that "research" (Bell Labs' uucp name) had a gotten a 6/32 and "they named it ’thunder’".

Our benchmarks on the 6/32 showed that "thunder" was justified but we ended up waiting on the 8600, which turned out to be a great machine.

This is getting further OT but when the UA computer center replaced a VAX 78X running VMS with an 8600 they started getting calls from users saying that some DCL commands weren’t working. It turned out that the 8600 was so much faster than the 78X that when one hit ENTER, the next prompt seemed to immediately appear, as if the command line had been ignored.


> On Jan 15, 2026, at 6:54 AM, Marc Donner via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
> 
> Thank you, Noel!
> 
> =====
> mindthegapdialogs.com <https://www.mindthegapdialogs.com>
> north-fork.info <https://www.north-fork.info>
> 
> On Thu, Jan 15, 2026, 08:25 Noel Chiappa via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
> 
>>> From: Marc Donner
>> 
>>> A colleague asked for this manual:
>>> "Does anyone have an architecture manual / processor manual ... for
>>> this system, for the CCI POWER 6/32 (or any of it's rebadgings
>> 
>> If one (or _anything_) turns up, it's _crucial_ that it be scanned, and the
>> scans sent to Bitsavers!!! Almost nothing is known of this
>> historically-important machine - the first thing other than a VAX that BSD
>> was ported to.
>> 
>> 
>> I did a fair amount of scratching around, and starting with the toolchain
>> (mostly the debugger), which still exists, I was able to retrieve enough to
>> give us a decent idea of the machine:
>> 
>>  https://gunkies.org/wiki/Power_6/32
>> 
>> There was discussion of trying to create an emulator, from the info in
>> the toolchain:
>> 
>>  https://gunkies.org/wiki/Talk:Power_6/32
>> 
>> I was able to work out, from the instruction decode stuff in the debugger,
>> what the instructions look like (fields, etc): but that still doesn't tell
>> us what all the instructions _do_, at the level of detail that would be
>> needed
>> for successful emulation. We'd really need that manual!
>> 
>> There is also "Installing and Operating BSD UNIX on the Tahoe", linked from
>> the above.
>> 
>>        Noel
>>