28-09-2021, 11:14 PM
Ah Betts. Great guy. Taught communication theory like a champ - I still have his book on the shelf as I type. He had a beautiful green Triumph TR5 which was his passage off this mortal coil in a crash. He mustn't have been very old.
Yes that old ICL had core store memory. If you needed more than 8k (the machine had 32k max) you had to get written permission from your supervisor. Anything that needed more than 32k (can't for the life of me remember if that was bits or bytes, or some other word length) ended up using tape drives as part of the storage process, and was classified as "low priority". i.e. come back in a week and if you're really lucky there might be a print out in your pigeonhole.
Yes that old ICL had core store memory. If you needed more than 8k (the machine had 32k max) you had to get written permission from your supervisor. Anything that needed more than 32k (can't for the life of me remember if that was bits or bytes, or some other word length) ended up using tape drives as part of the storage process, and was classified as "low priority". i.e. come back in a week and if you're really lucky there might be a print out in your pigeonhole.
