Honeywell/Bull DPS-6 deskside info?

Dave G4UGM dave.g4ugm at gmail.com
Thu Sep 24 04:20:02 CDT 2015


The DPS6 is a very different animal to the GE600 -> GE6000  > Level 66 => DPS300 which were as far as I know all TTL or LSI TTL....
... The CPU was built on wire wrap boards which were around 14" or 16" square (say 35cm) and which slotted into a backplane.
.. the machines had an extensive test suite which the CE ran weekly. This could vary the voltages to the logic chips....
.. when a faulty board was found they were usually repaired on-site, there was a board tester shipped with each system to identify chip level faults.
.. this contrasts with the earlier H3200 we had which was fixed by board level repair..

The CPU and Memory were in separate cabinets, much like the 360/67 but Honeywell kept the same layout when moving from core (I think the GE6000/H6000 were core) on to D-Ram in the L66.
The CPU number and I think the RAM start addresses were all configured on switchs, so it was possible to split a Dual CPU machine into two singles for testing. 

The peripherals came from MPI a joint venture with CDC

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_Data_Corporation#Magnetic_Peripherals_Inc.

There are more ramblings, (not from me) here:-

http://www.feb-patrimoine.com/english/gecos_to_gcos8_part_2.htm

The GCOS-3 Control Cards and Abort Codes Pocket Guide DD04 Rev.0 is sat on my desk in the scanning queue...

Dave

> -----Original Message-----
> From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Josh
> Dersch
> Sent: 24 September 2015 08:11
> To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
> <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
> Subject: Re: Honeywell/Bull DPS-6 deskside info?
> 
> On 9/23/15 2:56 PM, Sean Caron wrote:
> > Ah, so these are the vintagetech.com machines! Please take lots of
> > pics of the DPS-8 inside and out; I've never really seen the innards
> > of a Honeywell machine before and I'm kind of curious what their "style"
> looks like.
> >
> > Best,
> >
> > Sean
> 
> Will do.  I took the boards out to inspect them tonight (they had rattled about
> a bit during shipment) and everything seems ok.  I'll have time to take some
> pictures this weekend.  Unfortunately, somewhere along the line someone
> disconnected nearly all the ribbon cables running to the boards and I've got
> no idea what goes where (only a couple are cohesively labeled.)  This thing is
> going to be a project.
> 
> - Josh
> 




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