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  • Claude Kagan ( was Re: Origins Of Interrupts)

    From Al Kossow@aek@bitsavers.org to comp.arch on Fri Mar 28 04:56:06 2025
    From Newsgroup: comp.arch

    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 https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/search/?s=kagan

    The barn burned down, with the B205 in it.


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  • From John Levine@johnl@taugh.com to comp.arch on Fri Mar 28 17:36:48 2025
    From Newsgroup: comp.arch

    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
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  • From Lawrence D'Oliveiro@ldo@nz.invalid to comp.arch on Wed Apr 2 06:27:27 2025
    From Newsgroup: comp.arch

    On Fri, 28 Mar 2025 17:36:48 -0000 (UTC), John Levine wrote:

    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.

    I remember that brand name from the 1990s. I never knew about the original 1960s computer company until I saw the name pop up on Bitsavers.
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