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Cousin Stanley fed this fish to the penguins on Thursday 15 January
2004 12:33 pm:


>
> Honeywell also produced a line of mid-range machines
> called the Level 6 minicomputers ....
>
Ack... the infamous Level-6...

My college (now a university) mainframe was a Xerox Sigma-6 (Honeywell
bought out the Xerox line; of course, the Xerox line was bought out
from SDS, which was created by a bunch of IBM renegades -- hence the
use of EBCDIC rather than ASCII <G>). We had a lot of Gandalf
communication racks to handle the terminals (only n-of-M terminals
could be live at a time, the Gandalf stuff controlled allocating
terminals to the mainframe).

One year Honeywell persuaded the college that a Level-6 could be used
to replace most of the inflexible Gandalf gear... As I recall, it was
obtained with pretty much no OS or software -- a system definition file
for the Sigma's Meta-Symbol assembler was used to produce absolute
level-6 binary files (Meta-Symbol was an assembler that did not know
/any/ instruction set natively -- even the Sigma instruction set had to
be loaded using a system definition file -- though "standard
instruction formats" did have predefined "control macros". One defined
an instruction via declarations of the form:

LD cmd,2,3,3 b'01',af(1),af(2)

[note -- that's actually an 8080 MOV instruction masquerading as a
LoaD... cmd defined #bits per field, then we list a constant,
ArgumentField(position)...]).

Back to the Level-6... It worked great as a terminal server... until
the heat built up...

Apparently the main PC cards were mounted horizontally. When they got
warm they'd sag... Whoops, there went the connections to the
backplane... When it came back on-line one often found their terminal
was now connected to a totally different user's process. I once ended
up with a local high-school's account (they were on one of the /five/
dial-up modems that were available).

--
> ================================================== ============ <
> | Wulfraed Dennis Lee Bieber KD6MOG <
> | Bestiaria Support Staff <
> ================================================== ============ <
> Bestiaria Home Page: http://www.beastie.dm.net/ <
> Home Page: http://www.dm.net/~wulfraed/ <

On Friday 16 January 2004 04:57 MetalOne wrote in
< >:

> I also suppose I shouldn't rant to much about something that is
> free. However my first two GUIs hit critical problems, and
> these were really simple GUIs. Granted, the first problem has been
> fixed now, and I have not yet written a bug report on the second.

I think that ranting is good *IF* it has a bug report to the
developers to back it up.

Developers can't imagine all the uses people will do from their work
and they need to know what happened when you tried doing something so
that they can help you: fixing the problem, pointing another way of
doing it or even saying that it can't be done and making you stop
loosing your time trying to figure out what you can do


With regards to the notebooks page, have you seen that there are two
methods: AddPage and InsertPage? With InsertPage you can specify the
position where the page is to be inserted, putting them on the
desired order. But I don't know if you already tried that and it
didn't do what you expected...


Be seeing you,
--
Godoy. <>

Cameron Laird <> pisze:

>>> Why is it the best minicomputer ever made?
>>> I really want to know!
>>
>>Since nobody ever produced any other. Only IBM produced machines that
>>can be called "midrange" (something between microcomputer and "real
>>computer", the famous S/390 mainframe). They still use this terminology.
> .
> .
> .
> Sneaky, Jarek; but there were a LOT of "minicomputer"
> manufacturers, including DEC, Data General, HP, Prime,
> ...

Oops! It seems I'm too young to make such authoritative statements, my
adventure with computers started in mid-80's. So, please, take my
apologies for inconvenience.

--
Jarek Zgoda
Unregistered Linux User #-1
http://www.zgoda.biz/ JID:zgoda-a-chrome.pl http://zgoda.jogger.pl/

дамјан г. wrote:
>>(will not mention that it works on AS/400, the best
>>minicomputer(!) ever made).
>
>
> Why is it the best minicomputer ever made?
> I really want to know!
>
>
HP/3000, taken off the sales list last Halloween.

A joy to work with.

Believe it or not, it was ported to run as a UNIX emulator in the '80s,
so it could be available forever, but HP's politics killed it.

Gresham's law applied to computing: bad software drives out good.
(Perl vs Python, et cetera, et cetera).

OS-wise an incredible innovative and visionary machine,
programming-wise you had .NET (read as: multi-language
runtime-environment) since more than a decade. unequaled productivity
for business application development with the usual triple
dialog-processing - business logic - database.

if only it had more cool ILE-languages than RPG, CL, Cobol and a
poorly supported C/C++.

btw.: there is even a python port for the AS/400, but even if CL as
ugly as a nightmare it can't be beaten in terms of productivity on an
AS/400.

Frank Bechmann <> pisze:

> btw.: there is even a python port for the AS/400, but even if CL as
> ugly as a nightmare it can't be beaten in terms of productivity on an
> AS/400.

Yes, htpp://www.iseriespython.com/. Discovery of existence of Python for
iSeries made me switch back to AS/400 from Unix.

--
Jarek Zgoda
Unregistered Linux User #-1
http://www.zgoda.biz/ JID:zgoda-a-chrome.pl http://zgoda.jogger.pl/