The DDP-24 (1963
) was a 24-bit computer designed and built by the
Computer Control Company Computer Control Company, Inc. (1953–1966), informally known as 3C, was a pioneering minicomputer company known for its DDP-series (Digital Data Processor) computers, notably:
*DDP-24 24-bit (1963)
*DDP-224 24-bit (1965)
*DDP-116 16-bit (1965)
*D ...
, aka 3C, located in
Framingham, Massachusetts
Framingham () is a city in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the United States. Incorporated in 1700, it is located in Middlesex County and the MetroWest subregion of the Greater Boston metropolitan area. The city proper covers with a pop ...
. In 1966 the company was sold to
Honeywell
Honeywell International Inc. is an American publicly traded, multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. It primarily operates in four areas of business: aerospace, building technologies, performance ma ...
who continued the DDP line into the 1970s.
Hardware
The DDP-24 was completely transistorized and used
magnetic core memory
Magnetic-core memory was the predominant form of random-access computer memory for 20 years between about 1955 and 1975.
Such memory is often just called core memory, or, informally, core.
Core memory uses toroids (rings) of a hard magneti ...
to store data and program instructions. It had a
sign magnitude code to represent positive or negative numbers and used binary logic. The DDP-24 used a
single address command format and single operation with index and indirect addressing flags.
Market acceptance
The DDP-24 found use in space and flight simulators of the mid-1960s and other real-time scientific data processing applications.
Peter B. Denes, a researcher at
Bell Telephone Laboratories
Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984),
then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996)
and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007),
is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...
, Inc., installed a DDP-224 system around 1965 for use in speech research. It and a DDP-24 were used by
Max Mathews
Max Vernon Mathews (November 13, 1926 in Columbus, Nebraska, USA – April 21, 2011 in San Francisco, CA, USA) was a pioneer of computer music.
Biography
Mathews studied electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology and the Ma ...
, considered by many to be the founding father of computer music, to develop his GROOVE music system, as related by Professor
Barry Vercoe in a 1999
MIT Media Lab
The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fixed academic disciplines, but draws from ...
interview. When asked to describe the first
MIT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...
experimental music studio, Prof. Vercoe replied, "We began that work when I first arrived in 1971. The first studio we had was in the basement of Building 26, where we had a computer given to MIT by Max Mathews--the Honeywell DDP-24. Max initially developed his GROOVE system on this machine and was kind enough to give it to MIT when I joined the faculty." The 3C DDP-24 used modules or cards called S-Pac's. These S-Pac cards could be
Flip-Flops
Flip-flops are a type of light sandal, typically worn as a form of casual footwear. They consist of a flat sole held loosely on the foot by a Y-shaped strap known as a toe thong that passes between the first and second toes and around both side ...
,
NAND gates
In digital electronics, a NAND gate (NOT-AND) is a logic gate which produces an output which is false only if all its inputs are true; thus its output is complement to that of an AND gate. A LOW (0) output results only if all the inputs to the ...
,
Bit Registers etc. and were housed in a DDP-24 S-Bloc card rack. An early
raster-scan graphics display was developed for the computer system.
[Noll, A. Michael, "Scanned-Display Computer Graphics," Communications of the ACM, Vol. 14, No. 3, (March 1971), pp. 145-150.]
External links & Bibliography
DDP-24 Instruction Manual, August 64, PDFAdams Report 1967, PDF*
References
{{reflist
24-bit computers