Re: [TUHS] More Spider

[Jon Steinhart <jon@fourwinds.com>]

Minor correction to Ken's post, it was a Honeywell 516, not Packard Bell.
I lived on this machine for years.  Carl Christensen was one of the
Explorer Scout advisors along with Heinz which is why we got to play with
their machines.

The Pierce loop was up an running by the time that I showed up which was
maybe 1969 or 1970.  I don't recall ever meeting Pierce.  My recollection
is that the serious digital hardware guys in the group were Dave Weller,
John Sheets, John Schwartzwelder & John Camlet.  And Joe Condon had his
fingers in everything and made sure that everything reeked of cigarette
smoke.

I'm guessing that work was being done on Spider while the loop was in use,
again, because I remember the rack with the tempo, phone handset, and Tek
display near the 516.  And I'm pretty sure that I remember Sandy messing
with it on occasion; I think that he's the one that demonstrated to me that
there was an option to hook the handset up to a DAC that was on the program
counter or something, so one could listen and figure out if things were
running properly.  I think that there was a rack panel with a rotary switch
that one could use to select the handset source.

It sounds like a number of the devices that were connected to the loop
migrated to Spider after I left.

I'm guessing that when the article says that there were graphics display
terminals connected that those were the GLANCE G terminals that I mentioned
in an earlier post.  And, the PROM programmer makes sense too; I think that
this was in the room shared by John Camlet and Dan Belinski and was used to
program the TTL PROMs that contained the GLANCE G microcode.  This sticks
out in my mind because of the time that John and I tracked down and fixed a
microcode bug.

The rest of the network configuration is unfamiliar to me, again as it came
after I left.  I do remember that Max Matthews had a pile of DDP-224s because
his lab was yet another cool place to hang out.  The 516 hooked to the IC test
system was one of my projects.  It wasn't in area 10, I believe that it was in
area 20 under Iverson.  It had its own loop, sounds like it was later replaced
by Spider.

Not sure where it fits into the evolution of things, but I recall that our
department was split.  Hank Macdonald handled the Murry Hill end of things,
and Cher Cutler the Homdel end.  I don't remember exactly what was going on
at Homdel (other than blinding drivers on the Garden State Parkway), but I
recall that they had run a whole bunch of optical fiber underground I think
using the same ductwork that went to the fountains which were not purely
decorative, they were the chillers for the HVAC system too.

Jon