On 05/10/2006, at 10:15 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote:
On Wed, 4 Oct 2006, Brian Knittel wrote:
The thrust meter project -- was that an analog
meter that displayed %
CPU utilization? I remember that Tom Ferrin had one mounted in the
middle of a DEC panel filler on the 11/70 at the Computer Graphics
Lab
at UCSF. It was really delightful having this analog meter
bouncing up
and down as people worked away.
It integrated the BUS BUSY signal over a suitable time constant
(and my
electronics knowledge is a bit too rusty to figure out Tc, but with a
10uF tantalum capacitor I imagine it would be a few seconds).
Um, depends what you mean by thrust. It was originally designed for a
11/45
where bus activity would have been a fare indication of machine load
since
all memory and i/o used the unibus (I'm excluding the effects of fastbus
memory on 11/50 and 55's).
The 11/70 unibus was actually slower than the 11/45, and generally
didn't
have memory or disk/tape i/o on it (separate memory bus and massbus). So
'thrust' was probably mainly character i/o (dh and dz's) and older
disk/tapes (RK05's etc)
Now, where's 11/70 maintenance printset?
I got them here. :-)
Hmm, but yeah. Since the bus might be idle even though the CPU is
running, you might not get a very good reading by looking at the unibus.
But I think there are other signals that would be better to integrate
over. Such as the MASTER lamp (or is it the CPU lamp perhaps?) of the
front panel.
Johnny