Custom Menus on High-End RPL Machines

[Giuseppe Donnini]

(04-03-2019 10:34 AM)Raymond Del Tondo Wrote:  I think I somewhere read about how Frank Wales and others from Zengrange went to Corvallis for the project.

Exactly! Here's an excerpt from a transcript I made of Bill Wickes' talk in Philadelphia on November 11th, 1990 (warm thanks go to Jake Schwartz for sharing his video collection):

"I talked about times being different from the 41 time, and that's true in another way that I didn't mention before: In the 41, the plug-in modules were 4K of ROM and it was quite reasonable for an engineer at HP in those days to spend a month or so boning up on something like surveying, and write a little module that would exercise the 41 to its capacity on the topic of surveying. For the 48, that's just no longer practical. You can put so much into a plug-in card that it's just not reasonable to expect a mechanical engineer, or a software engineer, or anybody like that, to become expert in somebody else's field, and write a card that would stand on its own two feet in the world. So basically, the strategy with the 48 is, for the most part, to encourage other people to write cards—not for us necessarily, but for themselves, and we'll just sell the mainframes. Now, sometimes we will identify something as either being strategic or important, like in the case of the 41 emulator. We subcontracted that to Zengrange Co. out of England to write, because they have a lot of 41 expertise, and we actually brought them into our R&D lab, gave them a desk right across from mine, and they sat there for six months to develop that card right on our development systems."