CUCPS 1996-1997
CUCPS was founded in Michaelmas Term 1996. In the 1996-1997
academic year we held the following talks (all held in LR5 in the
Engineering Department, mostly at 8:30pm):
- Our first event was a talk by Mr (now Dr) A.R. Duell of the Department of
Engineering on Tuesday 28th January 1997,
entitled Megabyte, Megapixel, MIPS -- The
first commercial graphics workstations (about PERQ systems, in
case you can't tell from the title :-)).
An EPS file of the poster advertising the talk
(135k) is available; this poster
was originally hand drawn due to compatibility problems
between my different computer systems which I intend to resolve!
Online resources about PERQ systems include the newsgroup alt.sys.perq, Bob Davis's PERQ web site
and PERQ ftp
site, and the perq-fanatics@xenon.che.ilstu.edu
mailing list. This talk had an audience of 12.
- Dr Arthur Norman of the Computer Laboratory spoke on 18th
February 1997 on The Cambridge University Processor Group -- its
hardware projects and the SKIM computer. This talk had an
audience of 11.
- Tony Duell gave another talk on 4th March 1997, this one on
The PDP-11/45 -- 25 Years of high-performance
minicomputing, starting at the earlier time of 8:15pm. It was
followed by our AGM. A member of the audience drew our attention to a
paper by Burnet and Supnik: Preserving
Computing's Past:
Restoration and Simulation, published in Digital
Technical Journal Vol 8., No. 3 (1996) pages 23--38. In
addition an excellent simulator of the PDP-11 is on Digital's ftp site;
more recent versions of the simulator are available from Bob Supnik's web site. A
copy of the paper is in the CUCPS
library. This talk had an audience of 9.
- On 13th May 1997, Dr Wlodek Mier-Jedrzejowicz of Imperial College
spoke on `ENTER > =' -- Why HP Calculators
were so special. Wlodek brought a large collection of early
portable HP calculators which he then discussed, illustrating HP
design goals and how they successfully produced a very reliable range
of calculators which can be collected without the problem of taking up
lots of space, which collecting certain other kinds of computational
devices can pose. He also kindly donated a copy of his book to CUCPS.
This is now in the CUCPS library. This
talk had an audience of 12.
Minutes of the AGM of 4th March 1997 are also
available.
Tony Duell, who gave two of the 1996-1997 talks, has kindly
permitted us to distribute his notes.
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Last updated: $Date: 2001/11/09 22:18:05 $