AMSYS29 floppies

[Randy Dawson]

> From: ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk
> Subject: Re: AMSYS29 floppies
> To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
> Date: Mon, 22 Nov 2010 21:12:41 +0000
> 
> >  I have a S100 board that is said to be a math processor board
> > that has a single 2901 on it. I have the manual as well.
> 
> I find that strange. A single 4 bit slice is not that useful. I asusme 
> there arten;t 2903s as well :-)
> 
> >  My Nicolet digital averager scope has several 2901s in it.
> > They used these just about anywhere one needed a little
> > more horse power.
> 
> Althoguh AFAIK DEC never used them in a PDP11 CPU. There were, of 
> course, used i nteh floating point processors for some PDP11s, and in the 
> VAX11/730
> 
> Three rivers diddn't use the 2901 in the PERQ, but they did use the 2910 
> sequencer. I suspect they regretted that decision, it made sense in the 
> origianl PERQ CPU with its 4K control store (the 2910 has 12 address 
> outputs), but as the 2910 can't be easily extended ot a larger address 
> width (unlike the 2909 or 2911 4-bit sequencer slices), all later PERqs 
> with 16K control stores had a circuit commonly known as the '2 bit 
> kjludge' (pun totally intentional!)
> 
> Apart from the obvious disk and tape controllers in some of my PDP11s,
> other machines I've got that use the 2900 series are the Philips P854 (the
> P800 CPU in 2900s, basically), a Xerox Daybreak, and the high-speed
> language processor in my HP9845. I think there's a 2910 sequencer
> (although no 2901s) on the 'transform sequencer bord' in my I2S model 75
> image display, but I would have to check
> 
> -tony

I had a 2900 based system for a bit, I was the sales rep for Superset.  Wish I had this machine today!
It was a graphics system, and at the time pretty well advanced.  It was a 48 bit architecture and I remember that it was sort of like a DSP instruction set, in that each 48 bit instruction was op code, two operands and a result.  It was designed as a FORTRAN engine to host a mainframe application, PLOT3D.
We carried it around town, sort of a cube 3'x3' with handles on the side.  NASA guys loved it, but never bought one.

I remember the founder of this company well, he wrote PLOT3D which I understand he later sold to SAS, as SASGRAPH

I found this article in Dr Dobbs by him:

Ian Hirschon, "Personal Supercomputing: Cray's ideas turn a PC into a 
virtual-memory 64-bit supercomputer", Dr. Dobb's Journal, Jun. 1992.*			
	

Last I heard, the box did find a home in the publishing world, with its ability to handle very large bitmap images.

Anybody else recall this machine?

Randy