Prime's first systems were built to emulate the CCC / Honeywell Series
16 family of computers. That architecture lived on to the end of
the Prime 50-Series as the S-mode instruction set and addressing
conventions.
The first Series 16 computer was the DDP-116, designed in 1964 at
CCC by Gardner Hendrie. It was intended to be a 14-bit machine, for
cost savings, but during the design phase, IBM announced the S/360,
pretty much setting a standard for byte size, and the design was
quickly altered to 16 bits.
CCC was later bought by Honeywell, and additional models (316, 416,
516) were added to the line. The 316 and 516 models are most famous
for having been used as the basis of the Interface Message Processor
developed by BBN for the young ARPANET, first in 1969.
The SIMH package contains emulation
for the H316. I have successfully assembled code in S-mode on a
Prime system, then run it on both a Prime system and the SIMH H316
emulation unchanged.
A few CCC / Honeywell documents are here because of the connection
between the Series 16 architecture and the 50-Series, and because it
may be useful to compare them to Prime documentation for equivalent
functionality.
More space is devoted to the Series 16 at several other sites, each
of which are worthy of a visit:
- n/a - DDP-116 Digital Data Processor Programmers Reference Card
- Description: Pocket reference - DDP-116 programming Published: ** Size: 719KiB Family: Series 16 Scanned by: William Maddox Original: http://www.ddp116.org/gallery/refcard_gallery/index.html
- n/a - H316 General Purpose Digital Computer
- Description: Brochure - Honeywell H-316 computer Published: 1965 Size: 7MiB Family: Series 16 Scanned by: Computer History Museum Original: https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102646157
- n/a - Microcoding the Honeywell Series 16
- Description: Document - Analysis of opcode bit patterns for the DDP-516 Published: ** Size: 39KiB Family: Series 16 Scanned by: ** Original: http://www.series16.adrianwise.co.uk/programming/microcode.html
- n/a - u-COMP DDP-516 General Purpose I/C Digital Computer, 1966
- Description: Brochure - Honeywell DDP-516 computer Published: 1966 Size: 1,007KiB Family: Series 16 Scanned by: Computer History Museum Original: https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102646115
- 71-281A - Programmers Reference Manual for the DDP-116 General Purpose Computer
- Description: Manual - DDP-116 minicomputer Published: 1966 Size: 12MiB Family: Series 16 Scanned by: Al Kossow Original: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/computerControlCompany/ddp-116/71-281A_DDP-116_Programmers_Ref_Feb66.pdf
- 71-293 - Inferface Manual for DDP-116 General-Purpose Computer
- Description: Manual - DDP-116 interfacing Published: 1965 Size: 2MiB Family: Series 16 Scanned by: Al Kossow Original: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/computerControlCompany/ddp-116/71-293_DDP-116_Interface_Manual_Jan65.pdf
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