"Robert Bonomi" wrote in message
ns...
In article ,
Morris Dovey wrote:
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?

Yuppers. It simulated addition via table-look-up. I never programmed on
one of those.

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

The 6000 series were nice machines, but they did have their quirks.

I, *unintentionally*, was responsible for one University machine crashing
nearly _two_dozen_ times in approximately a 1-week period. This accounted
for over 90% of all the crashes the machine experienced in two years.
WRY GRIN

I once caused a 6500 to lock out every other job by 'printing' a dozen or so
boxes of blank paper.