Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

It's a lot like the Burroughs B-25 (AKA the Convergent NGEN).

https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_convergent5Brochure198...

Convergent extended that idea into their Megaframe, which could be expanded by adding more enclosures, each with a number of separate processors.

http://bitsavers.org/magazines/Mini-Micro_Systems/198304_Meg...

This last one lists our familiar Steve Blank as one of its authors.

It must have been a sight to behold:

https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_MiniMicroSrDigest_8947...

I got to borrow one those Burroughs machines when I was 16 from a collector and they were really well built, but not great for a teen that wanted color screens and games. I did learn a tiny bit of Fortran.

Lots of envy here... I never even saw one in person. Would love to play with it.

It involves the 186, the rarest of x86 processors.

11 megabyte bus in 1983 is pretty impressive.

They were Sun's "the network is the computer" well before Sun had that idea.

I worked on those in the mid-80's. Very easy to program (we used PDS-ADEPT), but the Burroughs megaframe would always have issues.

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