For a minimal server which Raspberry Pi Linux image to use

The first computer I used was an Elliott 503 scientific computer with

8Kwords of 3.6 uS main ferrite core memory and, IIRC, 32 Kwords of 50 uS ferrite core backing store; it used this as the equivalent of a disk drive, loading programs from it or using it as scratch area. Elliott words were 39 bit, so no double length arithmetic was needed or provided, but each word held two instructions.

Its only peripherals were paper tape readers and punches, a lineprinter and a control typewriter, which interacted with a 25 word 'operating system' and was programmed on Algol 60 or assembler.

More gory details here:

Either 33 or 39 were delivered, all between 1963 and 1966, so the last

503s were delivered about the same time as the first PDP-8s.

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martin@   | Martin Gregorie 
gregorie. | Essex, UK 
org       |

The 503 was the blindingly fast one - the 803 ran the same code, but in serial mode: 288 us basic cycle and 576 us an instruction. It could chew an Algol program with the compiler for well over an hour, to spew then an error ...

The 803 was the second computer for me, after an IBM 1620.

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Tauno Voipio

Yes indeed.

The University gave us 3 minute priority compile and test slots, but in practice that was plenty of time for actual number crunching - I was using the Elliott for doing Gaussian curve fitting on data dumped out from a Mossbauer spectrometer's multi-channel analyser.

After I joined ICL and became sysadmin for Georges 1 and 3 I could never get the 1903S's compilation times any where near the speed of the Elliott

503 -and yet both machines had the same memory access times (3.6 uS).

The University also had an IBM 1130 - a real glacial performer beside the Elliott and decidedly sluggish in comparison with the 1903.

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martin@   | Martin Gregorie 
gregorie. | Essex, UK 
org       |

Ok enought of this....

The first computer I had and used was a 6800 single board computer with 256 bytes of static ram upgradeable to 1024 bytes. It booted from an eprom but I forget how large it was It had a hexadecimal display and keypad that you had to enter a program to run. Upon powerup and boot it would say via the hexadecimal LED display... CPU UP. No storage was available so evry time you powered up you had to re-enter your program.

BTW I still have this computer. I wonder if it will still boot up?

That sounds like a Heathkit ET-3400. There's a fairly active Yahoo group devoted to it. Consider yourself informally invited to join the Yahoo group. I don't recall what the procedure is to join the group, but I was able to get enrolled fairly easily.

My wife found an ET-3400 in the free box at a garage sale and brought it home for me. I had to increase the time length of the power-on reset pulse before mine would cold-boot reliably--likely due to an aging main power supply capacitor. In 1976, I had paid $38.50 for a 6800 chip but never built anything for it to go in, so I never powered it up.

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Robert Riches 
spamtrap42@jacob21819.net 
(Yes, that is one of my email addresses.)