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ICL 4130

The ICL 4130 was the 'real' computer that I cut my teeth on and spent many a happy hour maintaining. I still have full circuit diagrams for it and the engineers' pocket book.  It was a 'fully transportable computer' but not easily!!  Here is a photo I found on the net of the front of the CPU cabinet:

 

The chassis here contained the processor and, what would now be called, the ROM.  This machine's brain was put together with discrete diode/diode logic.  At the rear of this cabinet we had the interface unit that allowed it to talk to peripherals, other computers and the simulator. The simulator interface (TSTU - Trainer & Simulator Transfer Unit) was special build and actualy had 'integrated circuits' on it!. The front cabinet (shown) could be swung outward to get to the back plane wiring of the cpu and that of the inteface unit.  A wire wrapping tool was part of the computer engineers' kit along with a good AVO and Osciliscope.

Here we see a 'front on' view of the cpu cabinet

 

On the right are the rather large PSU's that could be disconnected at the rear (1 x mains and 1 x power out) and slid out for quick replacement (look at the size of each transformer! They weighed a bit too - definately a two handed job to replace)

The unit at the bottom monitored the power supplies and could be swithced to monitor various outputs.

Above that, the engineers' panel.  If you knew the machine code you could programme this machine off the keys and indeed basic diagnostic checks were carried out here. To it's left was the engineers' display panel showing a couple of the 24-bit registers and the code/data loaded by the panel.

There was another cabinet of the same size as the cpu one and that held the memory.  64K words of core memory. A significant amount and a joy to adjust for optimum performance on a night shift as the read and write currents were adjusted for optimum performance.

Of course no 'sleep', 'hibernate' or 'suspend' on this machine! If the power went off and then back on, it'd just carry on as if nothing had happened thanks to the core memory

What a machine!

 

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