[Simh] MIT MTC Docs

[Angelo Papenhoff]

On 31/12/19, Phil Budne wrote:
> 
> I subscribe to an RSS feed for bitsavers, and saw things being added
> here:
> 
> http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/lincolnLaboratory/mtc/
> 
> Surprised to see there was an older file here.  I never would have
> looked for MTC files under Lincoln Labs since, I thought it was
> a part of the Whirlwind project (built to test core memory for WW):
> 
> Ken Olsen is supposed to have been the MTC designer,
> his signature appears in
> 
> http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/lincolnLaboratory/mtc/M-2134_MTC_Tests_on_Magnetic_Memory_May1953.pdf
> 
> A few months ago I had spotted Whirlwind paper tape images on
> bitsavers, found one that looked like a binary, and figured out how to
> decode it into a 16-bit word, and started on a WWI simulation, but
> ran out of steam.
> 
> In any case, both WWI and MTC now seem like ripe targets for SimH!


The MTC is also very interesting to me, specifically the instruction set
design stages it went through. They had some quite diverging ideas for
it. In the end it ended up very much like the WW1.
In fact I've given a talk about the evolution from the WW1 to the PDP-6
three times this year [1] and wrote a simple WW1 emulator too [2].

I would definitely love to explore this whole topic a bit more! It's
very interesting and exciting. Maybe I'll even make an FPGA whirlwind...


aap

[1] http://pdp-6.net/talks/wwtour_slides.pdf
    http://pdp-6.net/talks/wwtour_diagrams.pdf
[2] https://github.com/aap/whirlwind/