8-bitters and multi-whatever

[Allison]

>
>Subject: Re: 8-bitters and multi-whatever
>   From: "Chuck Guzis" <cclist at sydex.com>
>   Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2007 15:59:59 -0700
>     To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
>
>On 13 Sep 2007 at 17:36, Roy J. Tellason wrote:
>
>> > And I'd also disqualify device-sharing, such as a MAC (multiple
>> > access controller) between an I/O device and two computers.  Those go
>> > WAY back...
>> 
>> I'm not familiar with such stuff.
>
>Ah,  showing my age.  "Back in the day" you might have two otherwise 
>independent mainframes and, say, two printers.  To have a system do 
>nothing but wait for a print job to finish while only one of the 
>printers was busy is a huge waste of resources.  A card punch might 
>be an infrequenly used piece of equipment, so why have two?  Or a 
>printer could be offline for maintenance, but why take the machine it 
>was attached to down also?  Or, instead of having two banks of 8 tape 
>drives for two machines, why not whittle that down to, say 12, and 
>allow the drives to be shared?  IIRC, most vendors offered some sort 
>of a MAC facility, even if it was a QSE.  CDC certainly did.

Most MAC setups again were master/slave.  An example was BOCES/LYRICs
PDP-10/TOPS-10 timeshare system that had a PDP-8I as the comms frontend
(switch).  The PDP-8 served as an intelligent peripheral but it's 
dectapes were not available to the 10.


>Of course, direct coupling of computers was also done, either via a 
>special I/O device or even shared bulk core.  But we never called 
>that "networking".

Mostly because it was a clear master slave lashup.  Generally/loosely
networking implied more than two machines and a more general ability 
to transfer/communicate as needed be it files, shared devices or some
combination of both with any machine being able to initiate and 
communicate as a peer to others that could do same or similar.


Allison