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GE-600 series

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The GE-600 series was a family of 36-bit mainframe computers in the 1960s, built by General Electric (GE).

It was developed by a team led by John Couleur out of work they had done for the military MISTRAM project in 1959. MISTRAM was a tracking system that was used on a number of projects (including Project Apollo) and the Air Force required a data-collection computer to be installed in a tracking station downrange from Cape Canaveral. The data would eventually be shared with the 36-bit IBM 7094 machine at the Cape, so the computer would likely have to be 36-bits as well (why they didn't use an IBM 7094 is something of a mystery). GE built a machine called the M236 for the task, and as a result of the 36-bit needs, it ended up acting a lot like the 7094.

GE originally hadn't intended on entering the commercial computer market with the machine. However by the early 1960s GE was the largest user of IBM mainframes, and producing their own machines seemed like an excellent way to lower the costs of their computing department. In one estimate the cost of development would be paid for in a single year of IBM rental fees. Many remained skeptical, but after a year of internal wrangling the project to commerciallize the M236 eventually got the go-ahead in February 1963.

The 600 series used 36-bit words and 18-bit addresses. They had two 36-bit accumulators, 8 18-bit index registers, and one 8-bit exponent register. It supported floating point in both 36-bit single-precision and 2 x 36-bit double precision, the exponent being stored separately, allowing up to 71-bits of precision (one bit being used for the sign). It had an elaborate set of addressing modes, many of which used indirect words, some of which were auto-incrementing or auto-decrementing. It supported 6-bit and 9-bit bytes through addressing modes; these supported extracting specific bytes, and incrementing the byte pointer, but not random access to bytes.

It also included a number of channel controllers for handling I/O. The CPU could hand off short programs written in the channel controller's own machine language, which would then process the data, move it to or from the memory, and raise an interrupt when they completed. This allowed the main CPU to move on to other tasks while waiting for the slow I/O to complete, a primary feature of time sharing systems.

The machine was originally offered as the main GE-635, and the half-speed GE-625. In fact both machines had identical core CPUs, but the 635 had two of them, in what is likely the first example of a general purpose SMP system. Apparently an even smaller GE-615 was offered, but it is unclear if this actually existed.

However continuing problems with the reliability of the magnetic tape systems used with the system cast a pall over the entire project. In 1966 GE froze many orders while others were cancelled outright. By 1967 these problems were cleared up, and the machines were re-launched along with an upgraded version of the GECOS operating system.

The GE-635 was used for the Dartmouth Time Sharing System starting in c1965.

In 1965, work started on the Multics project, and GE was selected as the computer supplier. They saw this as an opportunity to clearly separate themselves from other vendors by offering this advanced OS which would run best only on their machines. Multics required a number of additional features in the CPU to be truly effective, and John Couleur was joined by Edward Glaser at MIT to make the required modifications. The result was the GE-645, which included a number of security levels in the CPU, and instructions for handling virtual memory. Addressing was modified to use an 18-bit segment in addition to the 18-bit address, dramatically increasing the theoretical memory size and making virtual memory much easier to support.

A follow-on project to create a next-generation 645 started in 1967. The new GE-655 replaced the individual transistors from the earlier models with integrated circuits, which about doubled the performance of the machine while also greatly reducing assembly costs. However the machine was still in development in 1969, by which time the Multics project had finally produced an operating system usable by end-users. Besides MIT, Bell Labs, and GE, 645 Multics systems were installed at the US Air Force Rome Development Center, Honeywell Billerica, and Machines Bull in Paris. These last two systems were used as a "software factory" by a Honeywell/Bull project to design the Honeywell Level 64 computer.

GE sold its computer division to Honeywell in 1970, who renamed the GE-600 series as the Honeywell 6000 series. The 655 was officially released in 1973 as the Honeywell 6080 and about a dozen machines were sold. Various smaller versions were offered, from the 6030 to the 6070. A version of the 6080 with the various Multics-related changes similar to the 645 was released as the 6180. A few hundred 6180-architecture CPUs were shipped. Later members of the 6000 series were released under various names, including Level 68, DPS-8, DPS-88, DPS-90, DPS-9000 by Honeywell, Groupe Bull, and NEC.

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