On 4/12/2010 8:07 PM, Robert Bonomi wrote:
In ,
Morris wrote:

Yuppers on the oddness - my impression was that the CDC management team
had never quite been able to decide what they wanted to do when they
grew up. At one point they were even in the windmill business.

And they built computers that couldn't add!

They faked addition by 'complement and subtract'. (true!!)

That said, they were some of my favorite hardware to work on.

Was it the IBM-650 that was nicknamed the "CADET" for Can't Add, Doesn't
Even Try?

The only CDC machine I ever used was the 6500 at Purdue and it seemed to
do crank right along fair reliably.

The high-level architecture was positively elegant in it's simplicity and
regularity.

the closer to the hardware they got, the *stranger* things got.

Speaking of Burroughs... )

--
Morris Dovey
DeSoto Solar
DeSoto, Iowa USA
http://www.iedu.com/DeSoto/