Re: Claude Kagan ( was Re: Origins Of Interrupts)

According to Al Kossow  <aek@bitsavers.org>:

On 1/3/25 11:08 AM, John Levine wrote:
>

I belonged to a computer club in the late 1960s that met in a barn
full of old computer stuff that belonged to a guy who worked for
Western Electric.

>
Claude Kagan
>
The Computer History Museum has a few artifacts from him,
including his Packard-Bell PB-250

The PB-250 worked when we were meeting in the barn and we wrote
a few programs for it.  The memory was magnetostrictive delay lines
so you wrote your code on big pieces of paper trying to arrange
the instructions to get the most work done per cycle.

Peter Eichenberger noticed that its logic levels were similar to
those for a Calcomp drum plotter we had, so he built an interface
out of a few gates.  The step time for the plotter was about the
same as the delay line cycle time so he write some plotting programs
that just came up with one pen move per cycle, no further
synchonization needed.

PB sold their computer business to Raytheon who continued it for a
while.  Much later the Packard-Bell name was bought out of
bankruptcy and used for an unrelated line of cheap PC clones.

--
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly