

IBM and the Seven Dwarfs - helwr
http://www.dvorak.org/blog/ibm-and-the-seven-dwarfs-dwarf-one-burroughs/

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arethuza
It was certainly more interesting to learn about the details of the
architecture of Burroughs machines than to actually use them - the CANDE
"shell" was an abomination.

The only bright spot (at least for Tron fans) was the OS kernel being called
the "Master Control Program".

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ableal
I knew about the Burroughs B5000, but this tidbit about its 1956 predecessor
is thought provoking:

 _The 205 had a number of interesting characteristics besides being a decimal
computer. It utilized an spinning magnetic drum with average access time of
8.5 milliseconds. The drum had two sections. The high speed access section
which had each piece of data duplicated 10 times and offset on various bands
on the drum to increase the access time by 10. Here the average data access
time was .85 milliseconds._

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hga
Yeah, that's interesting.

The 1954 IBM 650 is rather famous for each instruction having the address of
the next instruction; one of the final phases of program construction was to
lay out the program optimally so that the next instruction would be just about
to come under a drum read head. Wikipedia says there was also an instruction
optimized for drum reading (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_650>).

~~~
koenigdavidmj
Relevant: The Story of Mel. <http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/mel.html>

