8-bitters and multi-whatever

[Roy J. Tellason]

On Wednesday 12 September 2007 07:43, Allison wrote:
> Mine started when I needed to get stuff from the various CP/M systems
> that even when they had disks were incompatable hard sector to soft
> or 8 and 5.25. I started with serial peer to peer as in pipmodem and
> similar.

Pipmodem?  That's a new one on me,  though the name is pretty suggestive.

> Later I did a two system resource sharing that grew to allow up to a
> potential 256 systems. In '82 the whole thing peaked with a multiprocessor
> S100 crate with intercommunications via pooled memory. 

How was that handled in the hardware,  particularly with regard to contention 
for access?  I vaguely recall running across some multiport memory chips,  
but their capacity wasn't anywhere near what was currently in use that didn't 
have that feature.

> All of the things I did and got to see and use colored my perception
> of what computers could do.  Usually it was far greater than marketed
> capability.

:-)


-- 
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space,  a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed.  --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James 
M Dakin