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Connection Machine Photo

Symbolics Boards

I was taking some photos of boards from a 3600-series Symbolics Lisp Machine from the collection of the RCS/RI, and was amused to see this. It's fascinating to be able to see logical components of a CPU, what are now microscopic regions of a chip, with the naked eye.

These are the adder and multiplier units on the (optional) Floating Point Acceleration board:

The chips themselves were made by Weitek

The complete CPU is made up of several boards. This shows the CPU (Data Path & Sequencer), front-end processor, memory interface, memory, and the interface boards to a Connection Machine supercomputer. (The ultimate peripheral!)

And the Data Path board, close-up:

And the computer as a whole (this is a single-user workstation!). From the top - front panel, card cage, blower (cooling), Fujitsu Eagle (hard drive):

When first powered up, the front panel display: