DDP-24 | |
---|---|
Design | |
Manufacturer | Computer Control Company |
Release date | 1963 [1] |
Units sold | 25+ (1964) [2] |
Price | $87,000.00 [2] |
Casing | |
Dimensions | Length : 233 cm (92 in) Depth : 100 cm (39 in) Height : 155 cm (61 in) [3] |
Weight | 2,000 pounds (910 kg) [2] |
Power | 2000 W @ 115 V AC [3] |
System | |
CPU | 24-bit processor @ 200 kHz (5 μs cycle) [1] |
Memory | 98 kilobytes (32767 x 24 bit) |
MIPS | 0.2 MIPS |
FLOPS | 100 000 FLOPS |
Successor | DDP-224 |
The DDP-24 (1963 [1] ) was a 24-bit computer designed and built by the Computer Control Company, aka 3C, located in Framingham, Massachusetts. In 1966 the company was sold to Honeywell who continued the DDP line into the 1970s.
The DDP-24 was completely transistorized and used magnetic-core memory to store data and program instructions. It had a sign magnitude code to represent positive or negative numbers and used binary logic. The DDP-24 used a single address command format and single operation with index and indirect addressing flags.
The DDP-24 found use in space and flight simulators of the mid-1960s and other real-time scientific data processing applications.
Peter B. Denes, a researcher at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc., installed a DDP-224 system around 1965 for use in speech research. [4] It and a DDP-24 were used by Max Mathews, considered by many to be the founding father of computer music, to develop his GROOVE music system, as related by Professor Barry Vercoe in a 1999 MIT Media Lab interview. [5] When asked to describe the first MIT experimental music studio, Prof. Vercoe replied, "We began that work when I first arrived in 1971. The first studio we had was in the basement of Building 26, where we had a computer given to MIT by Max Mathews--the Honeywell DDP-24. Max initially developed his GROOVE system on this machine and was kind enough to give it to MIT when I joined the faculty." The 3C DDP-24 used modules or cards called S-Pac's. These S-Pac cards could be Flip-Flops, NAND gates, Bit Registers etc. and were housed in a DDP-24 S-Bloc card rack. [6] An early raster-scan graphics display was developed for the computer system. [7]
Multics is an influential early time-sharing operating system based on the concept of a single-level memory. Nathan Gregory writes that Multics "has influenced all modern operating systems since, from microcomputers to mainframes."
A light pen is a computer input device in the form of a light-sensitive wand used in conjunction with a computer's cathode-ray tube (CRT) display.
The IBM 704 is a large digital mainframe computer introduced by IBM in 1954. It was the first mass-produced computer with hardware for floating-point arithmetic. The IBM 704 Manual of operation states:
The type 704 Electronic Data-Processing Machine is a large-scale, high-speed electronic calculator controlled by an internally stored program of the single address type.
The IBM 1401 is a variable-wordlength decimal computer that was announced by IBM on October 5, 1959. The first member of the highly successful IBM 1400 series, it was aimed at replacing unit record equipment for processing data stored on punched cards and at providing peripheral services for larger computers. The 1401 is considered to be the Ford Model-T of the computer industry, because it was mass-produced and because of its sales volume. Over 12,000 units were produced and many were leased or resold after they were replaced with newer technology. The 1401 was withdrawn on February 8, 1971.
A music sequencer is a device or application software that can record, edit, or play back music, by handling note and performance information in several forms, typically CV/Gate, MIDI, or Open Sound Control (OSC), and possibly audio and automation data for digital audio workstations (DAWs) and plug-ins.
The Intel i860 is a RISC microprocessor design introduced by Intel in 1989. It is one of Intel's first attempts at an entirely new, high-end instruction set architecture since the failed Intel iAPX 432 from the beginning of the 1980s. It was the world's first million-transistor chip. It was released with considerable fanfare, slightly obscuring the earlier Intel i960, which was successful in some niches of embedded systems. The i860 never achieved commercial success and the project was terminated in the mid-1990s.
The IBM 7090 is a second-generation transistorized version of the earlier IBM 709 vacuum tube mainframe computer that was designed for "large-scale scientific and technological applications". The 7090 is the fourth member of the IBM 700/7000 series scientific computers. The first 7090 installation was in December 1959. In 1960, a typical system sold for $2.9 million or could be rented for $63,500 a month.
The IBM 7030, also known as Stretch, was IBM's first transistorized supercomputer. It was the fastest computer in the world from 1961 until the first CDC 6600 became operational in 1964.
A framebuffer is a portion of random-access memory (RAM) containing a bitmap that drives a video display. It is a memory buffer containing data representing all the pixels in a complete video frame. Modern video cards contain framebuffer circuitry in their cores. This circuitry converts an in-memory bitmap into a video signal that can be displayed on a computer monitor.
Wavetable synthesis is a sound synthesis technique used to create quasi-periodic waveforms often used in the production of musical tones or notes.
The Cyclone, was a vacuum tube computer, built by Iowa State College at Ames, Iowa. The computer was commissioned in July 1959. It was based on the IAS architecture developed by John von Neumann. The prototype was ILLIAC, the University of Illinois Automatic Computer. The Cyclone used 40-bit words, used two 20-bit instructions per word, and each instruction had an eight-bit op-code and a 12-bit operand or address field. In general IAS-based computers were not code compatible with each other, although originally math routines which ran on the ILLIAC would also run on the Cyclone.
MUSIC-N refers to a family of computer music programs and programming languages descended from or influenced by MUSIC, a program written by Max Mathews in 1957 at Bell Labs. MUSIC was the first computer program for generating digital audio waveforms through direct synthesis. It was one of the first programs for making music on a digital computer, and was certainly the first program to gain wide acceptance in the music research community as viable for that task. The world's first computer-controlled music was generated in Australia by programmer Geoff Hill on the CSIRAC computer which was designed and built by Trevor Pearcey and Maston Beard. However, CSIRAC produced sound by sending raw pulses to the speaker, it did not produce standard digital audio with PCM samples, like the MUSIC-series of programs.
Max Vernon Mathews was an American pioneer of computer music.
Autocoder is any of a group of assemblers for a number of IBM computers of the 1950s and 1960s. The first Autocoders appear to have been the earliest assemblers to provide a macro facility.
The Honeywell 200 was a character-oriented two-address commercial computer introduced by Honeywell in December 1963, the basis of later models in Honeywell 200 Series, including 1200, 1250, 2200, 3200, 4200 and others, and the character processor of the Honeywell 8200 (1968).
IMLAC Corporation was an American electronics company in Needham, Massachusetts, that manufactured graphical display systems, mainly, the PDS-1 and PDS-4, in the 1970s.
The Honeywell 316 was a popular 16-bit minicomputer built by Honeywell starting in 1969. It is part of the Series 16, which includes the Models 116, 316 (1969), 416 (1966), 516 (1966) and DDP-716 (1969). They were commonly used for data acquisition and control, remote message concentration, clinical laboratory systems, Remote Job Entry and time-sharing. The Series-16 computers are all based on the DDP-116 designed by Gardner Hendrie at Computer Control Company, Inc. (3C) in 1964.
Richard Charles Boulanger is a composer, author, and electronic musician. He is a key figure in the development of the audio programming language Csound, and is associated with computer music pioneers Max Mathews and Barry Vercoe.
The DATAmatic 1000 is an obsolete computer system from Honeywell introduced in 1957. It uses vacuum tubes and crystal diodes for logic, and featured a unique magnetic tape format for storage.