17 Apr
2011
17 Apr
'11
10:51 a.m.
On 4/17/2011 4:57 AM, Bill Gosper wrote:
On Sat, Apr 16, 2011 at 7:00 AM, Henry Baker<hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:
Was the PDP-6 an "asynchronous" machine -- i.e., were all the modules sending requests& acknowlegements w/o a master clock?
No, it had a clock. But it used pulse logic instead of levels, which is generally conceded to have cost both speed and reliability. Fixed in the PDP10.
I recall that the PDP-10 actually had pulses representing 0's and 1's to and from memory, due to a terrible design decision by, I think, Alan Kotok. It drove us nuts at III when we were trying to interface some other gadget to the PDP-10 memory. Steve Gray, who remembers everything but his own name