Re: [TUHS] Spacewar at Bell Labs [ really paper tape readers and tangentially related things ]

[Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com>]

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On Wed, Jan 15, 2020 at 11:47 AM Noel Chiappa <jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:

> Wow! WD created the QBUS? Fascinating. I wonder if DEC made any changes to
> the
> QBUS between the original demo WD boards and the first DEC ones?

I can not say I know and I would suspect they peed on it in some manner,
that *was the DEC culture*.  I've just sent a note to Mr. BI to see if he
knows and I'll pass back anything I learn if I do.  Sounds like the sort of
thing they might have gotten changed before it was release.




> Are there any documents about the WD original still extant, do you know?
>
I'm pretty sure we had some stuff from WD at CMU, because CM* was made out
of a lot of them, and CMU did custom microcode so they could talk to the
capabilities and K.map HW.  I remember seeing some prints with WD markings
on it, but I was not heavily involved other than working the new
distributed front-end which we did with LSI-11s.

Somebody from the CMU HW lab like Jim Teter might know, although he did the
11/40e for C.mmp, I'm not sure who was the microcode guru on CM*  as that
was all happening as I was leaving.  I sent a couple of emails to folks
like Danny Klein, Mike Liebensberger, and Tron McConnell. Danny and Mike
are SW folks, Tron was a EE/HW type but mostly worked on other stuff at
Mellon Institute in those days.    But, IIRC, Tron was worked on a 3Mbit
Xerox board for the LSIs, so he might have had something.   We all did some
stuff with CM* (Mike more than any of us). FWIW: Tron was (is) a bit of
packrat and if he ever had anything like that, he might still have it.

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