video clip of the Burroughs B6700 Maintenance Diagnostics Logic (MDL) display

[Nigel Williams]

Sid sent us a screenshot from a friend of his who noticed the Burroughs B6700 MDL appearing in a television program from the UK. We managed to secure a couple of seconds of the relevant footage:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpv6pXlwEjY

By adjusting the URL the clip can be made to loop

https://www.youtube.com/v/lpv6pXlwEjY?version=3&loop=1&playlist=lpv6pXlwEjY

but it has a dark frame when it restarts that makes tracking the light transition difficult to see. Let me know if you would like the extracted clip to run on a desktop player to get an uninterrupted transition on looping.

[hvl...@zonnet.nl]

The last frame shows (part of) the‎ Burroughs B, right?

Hans

Verzonden vanaf mijn BlackBerry 10-smartphone.

Van: Nigel Williams Verzonden: donderdag 31 december 2015 06:03 Aan: retro-b5500 Onderwerp: [retro-B5500] video clip of the Burroughs B6700 Maintenance Diagnostics Logic (MDL) display

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[Nigel Williams]

On Thursday, December 31, 2015 at 8:46:30 PM UTC+11, hvlems wrote:

The last frame shows (part of) the‎ Burroughs B, right?

Yes it does, I will post a frame here for the record.

[Peter Quirk]

The engineers supporting the B6700 at the Gas & Fuel Corporation showed me a Space Wars program that animated the MDL with primitive space ships and shots being fired by laser or phasers. Does anyone know of this program?

Peter

[Paul Kimpel]

No, I've never heard of anything like that. There were lots of customizations of the CPU idle pattern displayed in the A/B/X/Y registers, most of them static. It wasn't that hard -- you just had to work out the pattern you wanted to display as hex digit, craft two double-precision words, push them onto the stack, execute IDLE, and pop them back off when the IDLE instruction completed. I only ever saw that done as an MCP patch. I had a patch that would display time of day (HH in the A/B registers and MM in the X/Y registers) which I'd like to recreate at some point.

But! Animating SpaceWar-like patterns in the MDL? That's impressive. I assume the program was a standalone ESPOL object loaded from the card reader.

[Peter Quirk]

I assume it was a stand-alone program, but I only saw it once and have only the vaguest memory of it.

Peter

[Peter Quirk]

I am familiar with the time-of-day display. That was popular in Melbourne.

On Thursday, June 11, 2020 at 2:39:38 PM UTC-4, Paul Kimpel wrote:

[Ian Joyner]

Owen Reddecliffe who I worked with for a couple of years told me how he changed the lights on the B6700 from displaying the Big B when CPU was idle to flashing M-I-C-K-E-Y-M-O-U-S-E.

A space wars program is another level up!

I remember spending time at Gas and Fuel in Melbourne and two weeks there doing ALGOL system programming with Arvid Prods.

Maybe a good thing that horrible G&F building was demolished.

Ian

Sent from my iPad

On 12 Jun 2020, at 4:23 am, Peter Quirk <Peter...@hotmail.com> wrote:



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[Lex O'Connor]

I worked as an operator and some ALGOL programming on the Gas & Fuel B6700 in Melbourne, Aust.

I only recall the standard B display and this was changed to G/F displayed in 2 sections of the control panel when the system was idol.

I seem to recall there were 2 B6700s. One production and the other development system.

Lex

[Clive Tooth]

Ahhh... Gas & Fuel... I remember visiting them in Melbourne once...

(I stumbled into this thread serendipitously.)

In late June 1973 (I think) Gas & Fuel started having a lot of problems with their B6500. (Or was it called a B6700 then?) The customer was very upset. Things were coming to a head. The Burroughs wizards in the USA were not immediately available due to the 4th July holiday. At that time I was a software person in a large systems support group based in Ruislip, England. So, myself and an engineer, Dave Knight (Knights?), were sent off to the other side of the planet to have a look at the problem.

When we got there, about 24 hours after departing, there was a pile of hexadecimal dumps at least a meter high in the corner of the support room. I grabbed the top one and sat down. [Back in the UK my wife departed on our summer holiday with our two very young children. I was not very popular.]

Anyway, the dumps revealed that the machine was sometimes getting sequence error interrupts. This is a rare error condition, caused, in this case, by the different stack bit (bit 47) being on in an MSCW when it should have been off. To cut a long story short this was caused by a recent MCP change which meant that the MCP was now using stack numbers higher than it had ever used before. The comparison circuit for the two stack numbers being compared broke the circuit rules for the B6500 (there were too many loads) causing it to give the wrong answer sometimes. Eventually someone arrived from Mission Viejo and declared that, yes, we had found a design fault. Hardware updates were applied to all B6500s worldwide.

[Ian Joyner]

I spent some time at Gas and Fuel (since demolished for Federation Square, no great loss an ugly building).

I think by that time, G&F had a B7700 or B7800. It was where I did the ALGOL system programming course with Arvid Prods just after starting with Burroughs.

Also spent some time in Ruislip (not at Burroughs) since we had family friends there. It is where they made the film about the Titanic ‘A Night to Remember’ swimming around in Ruislip Lido!

Ian

Sent from my iPad

On 9 Jun 2021, at 2:24 am, Clive Tooth <cli...@gmail.com> wrote:



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