seeking Burroughs B6700 manuals and software

COURYHOUSE at aol.com COURYHOUSE at aol.com
Sat Sep 5 01:50:05 CDT 2015


I will have to see. When we acquired the Aldrige collection at  SMECC  we  
pulled off all the really  really  early  material  and  put the remainder 
in storage  which should have some of this...  we also  have the unisys 
crossover stuff and  when  why bought up  the Varian minicomputer  too. I 
remember  we boxed and boxed... and  deep stored it.  guess it  did not  seem  
"really old"   at the  time....but  it has been about  10 years  since we  have  
pulled it out and run our hand  through it. 
 
Background on Aldrige  started on   the electrodata Pasadena  ...  ended up 
 running  the  phx    field  service effort here  and was a great packrat.
 
The effort to get to this material is a lot of  work
ed sharpe _www.smecc.org_ (http://www.smecc.org) 
 
 
 
 
 
In a message dated 9/4/2015 11:23:16 P.M. Mountain Standard Time,  
nw at retroComputingTasmania.com writes:

We would  be glad to hear from anyone who might have new material
related to the  Burroughs B6700.

We're on the hunt for any manuals or software related  to the Burroughs
large systems so we can build an emulator for the B6700.  This search
includes the B5000, B6000, B7000 families, since there is  considerable
overlap across these families and collateral from one system  family
can assist understanding another. Example models include B5500,  B5700,
B6500, B7500, B6700, B7700, B6800, and B7800.

We were  amazingly lucky with the B5500 to have so much of the  critical
documentation (thanks Bitsavers!) and a complete suite of  system
software, but even though the B6700 was more recent and produced  in
larger numbers we're not having the same level of good fortune  finding
artifacts.

What we have so far is documented  here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JnMsyE8ssJi_-MUsK0rT9LPtNpeJCpTv1QrF
w-917Y8/edit?usp=sharing

If  you're interested in this system then you likely remember that it
had a  particularly impressive front-panel display, seen  here:

http://www.retrocomputingtasmania.com/home/projects/burroughs-b6700-mainfram
e#TOC-B6700-Display-Panel

This  was known as the MDL display: Maintenance Diagnostics Logic
display.  Because the MDL had the 4 x top-of-stack registers down to
the bit-level  particular bit-patterns allowed words to be displayed.
The early MCPs put  IDLE into the display during IO waits, and
subsequent releases: B for  Burroughs, but sites quickly started
putting their own company initials or  the time.

The Danish museum is so far the only place I've found that  kept the  MDL:

http://datamuseum.dk/wiki/Genstand:11000045_Konsolpanel_Burroughs_B6700

Thanks  to Finn Verner Nielsen for being so helpful and undertaking an
expedition  into their warehouse to locate and photograph the item for
us. On that DDHF  web-page you will see on the left of the picture the
B7800 MDL they have  too.

My goal is to also construct a replica of the B6700  MDL.


Steps undertaken so far:
Posts to newsgroups
Posts on  LinkedIn, wikipedia, Yahoo groups
Emails to a few dozen people who were  involved with the system
Trawling the  Internet



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