My new toy (TI 990)

[cbmeeks]

This was given to me by a friend at work.  It has some major rust on the PSU's and some of the case.  Ignore the HP rack enclosure.  It was just something to stack these behemoths in.

Hope to restore this one day.

 

[Jimhearne]

I'm very jealous.

More pictures please.

 

Jim

[cbmeeks]

[cbmeeks]

This thing is HEAVY.  Especially the hard drive.

[+dhe]

In it's day, the TEN X Cobol Accelerator was a real thing to have.

 

That was when companies spent 100K on a computer, a 50K computer guy to go along with it, didn't seem like such a big deal! 😃

[cbmeeks]

Yeah, I can't imagine what this computer cost back in the day.  One of those cards is a 2 MiB  cache card too.  Which was a lot of RAM in the early 80's.  I can't figure out what this machine would have been used for.  It has a bunch of cards that all have 4 or 8 ports.  I'm not sure what they were used for.  I assumed maybe printers or maybe some type of industrial operation.  But the COBOL card tells me it probably ran some business software.  Perhaps financial reports that ran on a bunch of printers??  Who knows.

 

One day, I will put power to it.  But the PSU's are in very bad shape and I'm not an expert on this machine.  Too nervous to just power it on. 

[+retroclouds]

So what does the COBOL accelerator card do? How would it accelerate COBOL programs in anyway?

[cbmeeks]

1 hour ago, retroclouds said:

So what does the COBOL accelerator card do? How would it accelerate COBOL programs in anyway?

My assumption would be the same way any other accelerator would.  Such as a BASIC compiler, etc.  I actually have a book or two on COBOL but never got into it.  However, in 2006 I was told by a very large insurance company (job interview) that if I knew COBOL, they would hire me on the spot.

 

 

[+FarmerPotato]

1 hour ago, retroclouds said:

So what does the COBOL accelerator card do? How would it accelerate COBOL programs in anyway?

The 990/12 or DNOS assembly language programmers’ manual gives 100 new instructions. Several have to do with string processing. It’s quite a zoo. Many take 3 operands!

 

I speculate that these would be used by the COBOL compiler. 
 

What CPU is the COBOL accelerator for?

 

Earlier manuals hint at external application processors : see the XIT instruction. “MID” (undefined opcodes) instructions would run in software under the INT2 vector, unless a peripheral on the bus signaled it would handle it. Like a floating point coprocessor for instance.
 

This got rolled into the 99105. In its databook, they are still called external Application Processors.
 

Suppose a bunch of instructions  had debuted in this COBOL accelerator? And could have been rolled into the 990/12 CPU. Either way, they would be implemented as microcode. 

Edited November 9, 2022 by FarmerPotato

[Jimhearne]

Would the multiple port cards not connect to terminals for a multi user system ?

 

Was there any documentation with it ?

 

Jim

[cbmeeks]

Unfortunately, no.  I'm not even quite sure how to tell which TI 990 this is.

[+FarmerPotato]

41 minutes ago, cbmeeks said:

Unfortunately, no.  I'm not even quite sure how to tell which TI 990 this is.

I’m just guessing.. start by counting the number of cards    The CPU would be implemented as 1 to 5 cards, quite dense with TTL. 
 

There are a few hints of COBOL in this TI MIX 1983 symposium program. No Ten X but quite a lot  of COBOL on the agenda. I wish we had a time machine and could go.

 

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ti/ti-mix/1983_tiug_agenda.pdf
 

[+dhe]

11 hours ago, cbmeeks said:

Perhaps financial reports that ran on a bunch of printers?

I hear printing invoices was very popular! 😃

[Jimhearne]

9 hours ago, cbmeeks said:

Unfortunately, no.  I'm not even quite sure how to tell which TI 990 this is.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The cards are labelled on the left hand sloped end in this picture, but i think the processor card/cards are hidden behind the ribbon cable. 

 

Jim

 

[Jimhearne]

10 hours ago, cbmeeks said:

Unfortunately, no.  I'm not even quite sure how to tell which TI 990 this is.

 

The connectors and LED on the end of the top card, labelled SMI (System Memory Interface) seems to match up with a  990/12 SMI card.

 

Jim

Edited November 10, 2022 by Jimhearne

[jbdigriz]

On 11/9/2022 at 9:42 AM, cbmeeks said:

Yeah, I can't imagine what this computer cost back in the day.  One of those cards is a 2 MiB  cache card too.  Which was a lot of RAM in the early 80's.  I can't figure out what this machine would have been used for.  It has a bunch of cards that all have 4 or 8 ports.  I'm not sure what they were used for.  I assumed maybe printers or maybe some type of industrial operation.  But the COBOL card tells me it probably ran some business software.  Perhaps financial reports that ran on a bunch of printers??  Who knows.

 

One day, I will put power to it.  But the PSU's are in very bad shape and I'm not an expert on this machine.  Too nervous to just power it on. 

I've taken the liberty of notifying a /12 owner who had to repair his 990A13 PS recently about your post. Hopefully he will have some advice for you. You do want to proceed cautiously with this.

 

Most of the documentation you'll need is online at bitsavers. The 990A13  General Description was posted there not long ago. There is also one of the maintenance manuals for this chassis listed at CHM that wouild cover the power supply, but I don't think it's been scanned in yet. I need to check and put in a request if necessary. Bitsavers has documentation on the Fujitsu Eagle hard disk you have, and the Cipher F880 tape transport as well.

 

I think most of the CI403 documentation is available on bitsavers. It looks like the 8-port boards are Northwestern Digital CI408's, but I can't tell for sure. When you get a chance to pull the boards, taking pics as you go, I may be able to to tell more if you could post them here.  A good shot of the configuration sheet on top of the chassis would be helpful as well. Hopefully it's still close to the setup in the machine. I'd like to see the PS, too, if you can.

 

Unfortunately you seem to be missing the controller or controllers for the disk and tape drives. Given what I can make out of the config sheet, this probably would have been something like a Spectralogic 126, or maybe a 26, as the sheet seems to indicate disk and tape on one TILINE board, with maybe another controller board underneath it for a total of 4 drives, at some point.

 

I don't know for sure, but I think the Eagle will work with the TI SMD controller used with the Trident drives (DS50-DS300). Will try to confirm that. If so, I have one of those I might be willing to do some horse-trading with. Also maybe some cables.

 

Did you happen to get any software installation tapes, or is it likely these might be tracked down?

 

Good luck with it!

 

[jbdigriz]

On 11/9/2022 at 5:10 PM, Jimhearne said:

Would the multiple port cards not connect to terminals for a multi user system ?

 

Was there any documentation with it ?

 

Jim

Yeah, those 4 and 8 port boards are for serial terminals, like a 931 or 928 (or a Wyse 60, or whatever)  Or printers. This was most likely an office or store system for accounting, inventory, maybe reservations, patient or student records etc., given the COBOL use indicated. The 2 lower half-cards would be parallel printer ports. That was a common use for the 16 channel TTL I/O CRU card back in the day.

Edited November 13, 2022 by jbdigriz

[jbdigriz]

On 11/9/2022 at 3:10 PM, FarmerPotato said:

The 990/12 or DNOS assembly language programmers’ manual gives 100 new instructions. Several have to do with string processing. It’s quite a zoo. Many take 3 operands!

 

I speculate that these would be used by the COBOL compiler. 
 

What CPU is the COBOL accelerator for?

/10, /10A, and /12 running DX10, DNOS, or COS990, which I'm not that familiar with, is what I've found so far. The Ten X board itself is a custom 16 bit microcoded processor based on AM29203 ALUs. This implements the COBOL interpreter intermediate POP commands as hardware instructions as I understand it. Speedup for non-I/O intensive code is ~30x on a /12, ~10X on a /10, hence the name.

On 11/9/2022 at 3:10 PM, FarmerPotato said:

 

Earlier manuals hint at external application processors : see the XIT instruction. “MID” (undefined opcodes) instructions would run in software under the INT2 vector, unless a peripheral on the bus signaled it would handle it. Like a floating point coprocessor for instance.
 

This got rolled into the 99105. In its databook, they are still called external Application Processors.
 

Suppose a bunch of instructions  had debuted in this COBOL accelerator? And could have been rolled into the 990/12 CPU. Either way, they would be implemented as microcode. 

I've gotten far enough into the user manual to ascertain that COBOL programs need to be patched to work with the accelerator, but something like the mechanism you describe could be in play as well. As for using a /12 CPU instead, possibly, but you'd need to use it as a TILINE slave instead of a general purpose host CPU and bus master. There is info in the /10A manual about using multiple CPU cards in the same chassis. This is assuming of course that the PLA's in the /12's '481 ALUs have the capacity to load all the COBOL interpreter microcode, with or without leaving room for the /12 instructions. Be fun to look into, but when all is said and done, the Ten X board was designed from the ground up as a language processor and I think it would likely always do a better job at that task.

 

If anyone has any better insight into this, please feel free to fill us in.

Edited November 13, 2022 by jbdigriz