Honeywell 6000

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Honeywell 6000, (GE-600) a family of 36-bit mainframe computers manufactured by Honeywell International, Inc. from 1970 to 1989 build from TTL SSI integrated circuits and ferrite core memory. They were re-badged versions of General Electric's GE-600-series originating in the 1960s as discrete transistor machines. The architecture was similar to the IBM 7090. The GE-600 aka Honeywell 6000 used 36-bit words and 18-bit addresses and had two 36-bit accumulators A and Q, eight 18-bit index registers X0 - X7, and one 8-bit exponent register to support floating point with the mantissa in both 36-bit single-precision and 2 x 36-bit double precision.

Systems were constructed of three main kinds of interconnected units, CPUs, system control units including memory, and I/O multiplexer (IOM) to connect peripherals, disk storage and tape drives.

=Selected Systems=

GE-635/645
The GE-635 as member of the GE-600 series was likely the first general purpose SMP system, though the GCOS/GECOS operating system treated the processors as a master and up to three slaves. At Dartmouth College, the GE-635 was used to develop Dartmouth Time Sharing System starting in 1965, while Multics was developed by MIT, General Electric and Bell Labs requiring virtual memory of the hardware advanced GE-645. The Dartmouth College chess programs Dartmouth CP and Dart 4.1 ran on the GE-635.

Level 66/68
Introduced in 1975, Level 66/68 were enhanced versions of the 6000 series, running GCOS/Multics. GCOS models included the 66/05, /10, /20, /40, /60 and /80, particular models with various memory sizes, etc.. Systems could have a maximum of seven CPUs and four IOMs, the total of the two restricted to eight.

DPS 8
The Honeywell DPS8 was a descendant of the GE-645 released in 1983. The DPS8/70 is a particular model in the line. Phoenix played the WCCC 1983 on such a $10 million machine.

=Chess Programs=
 * Dart
 * Dartmouth CP
 * Phoenix
 * Prodigy
 * Ribbit
 * Treefrog

=See also=
 * IBM 7090
 * PDP-6
 * PDP-10

=Publications=
 * Edward L. Glaser, John F. Couleur, G. A. Oliver (1965). System Design of a Computer for Time Sharing Applications. Fall Joint Computer Conference

=Manuals=
 * General Electric (1964). GE-635 System Manual. hosted by Computing History - The UK Computer Museum - Cambridge
 * General Electric (1964). GE-625 / 635 Programming Reference Manual. hosted by Ed Thelen
 * General Electric (1968). GE-645 System Manual. pdf
 * Honeywell (1971). Series 6000 Summary Description. pdf
 * Honeywell (1985). AL39 - Multics Processor Manual. pdf

=Brochures=
 * Honeywell Level 68 Multics System: Focusing on Today's Interactive Processing Needs (1973) hosted by The Computer History Museum
 * Honeywell: The Multics System (1975) hosted by The Computer History Museum

=Postings=
 * Info on GE-635 by Charles Richmond, alt.folklore.computers, January 29, 1991
 * Re: the legacy of Seymour Cray by Alan Bowler, alt.folklore.computers, January 08, 2016

=External Links=
 * GE-600 series from Wikipedia
 * Honeywell 6000 series from Wikipedia
 * Honeywell 6000 series - Computer History Wiki
 * Honeywell L66 DPS8 DPS8000 - Daniel T O'Callahan - IT Consulting
 * Honeywell DPS8 by Ed Thelen

=References=

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