Honeywell 6000

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The Dartmouth Computing Timeline - The 1960s ↩︎

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.

Contents

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 ¹, General Electric and Bell Labs requiring virtual memory of the hardware advanced GE-645 ² ³. 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 ⁴.

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 ⁵. Phoenix played the WCCC 1983 on such a $10 million machine.