Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!steinmetz!davidsen
From: davidsen@steinmetz.steinmetz.ge.com (William E. Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Cray architecture
Message-ID: <10151@steinmetz.steinmetz.ge.com>
Date: 29 Mar 88 16:11:28 GMT
References: <7762@alice.UUCP> <418@ole.UUCP> <3216@phri.UUCP> <1574@osiris.UUCP> <25959@yale-celray.yale.UUCP>
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen)
Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 15

In article <25959@yale-celray.yale.UUCP> lisper-bjorn@CS.YALE.EDU (Bjorn Lisper) writes:
| [...]
| Some historic computer trivia: the Swedish late-fifties computer BESK at
| some stage of its lifecycle had a loudspeaker connected to its instruction
| register. Different instructions gave a different sound, so you could hear
| it compute. A skilled operator could actually hear if the computer had got
| stuck in an infinite loop!

  We had an FM radio on our GE-605 (the military version of the 635) and
the operators could detect a hung CPU and in many cases a hung i/o
device. You could play tunes on it.
-- 
	bill davidsen		(wedu@ge-crd.arpa)
  {uunet | philabs | seismo}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me