23 Jan
2020
23 Jan
'20
2:38 p.m.
I have vague memories here that maybe Heinz can help
with if his are any better.
I believe that Sandy played a part in "the loop" or "the ring" or
whatever it
was called that we had connecting our Honeywell 516 to peripherals. I do
remember the 74S00 repeaters because of the amount of time that Dave Weller
spent tuning them when the error rate got high. Also, being a loop, Joe
Condon used to pull his connectors out of the wall whenever people weren't
showing up to a meeting on time. I don't know whether our network was a
forerunner to the spider network.
It most likely was Spider - it became operational in 1972. The vist report that I linked
to earlier also says:
"The current system contains just one loop with the switching computer (TEMPO I),
four PDP-11/45 computers, two Honeywell 516 computers, two DDP 224 computers,
and one each of Honeywell 6070, PDP-8 and PDP-11/20. In fact many of these are
connected in turn to other items of digital equipment.”
It would be interesting to know more about the H516’s and Spider, any other
recollections?