Talk:English Electric KDF9

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Talk[edit]

The UK tobacco company Wills operated a KDF9. It and its operator Ken Somers featured in a press ad campaign showing various Wills employees at work. The first appearance I have noted for Ken is the Observer colour supplement 21 November 1965. The computer is 'six months old' 'and can read and write 200,000 characters a second and print at a rate of 2,000 lines a minute'.Adamsez (talk) 06:32, 13 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

These specifications in the newspaper are wrong, needless to say, as is easily verifiable in the main article references. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.159.101.165 (talk) 03:18, 13 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It would be nice to list where the 29 machines were installed. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 147.147.121.239 (talk) 10:04, 28 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

See: <http://www.ourcomputerheritage.org/ccs-n2x1.pdf>

The Leeds University KDF9 certainly wasn't housed in a converted chapel when I was there 1970-73, it was in the very modern computing and physics building. I always thought the Eldon operating system was named after the near-by Eldon pub.86.145.211.32 (talk) 09:06, 24 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

It was when Eldon was conceived: "So we ploughed our own furrow. The earlier experiments had been called Eldon both as a joke because of the similarity to EGDON and in recognition of the fact that the Leeds KDF9 had originally been housed in a disused chapel, called Eldon Chapel. There was also a nearby pub called Eldon. So our new venture was called Eldon 2." See: <http://www.computerconservationsociety.org/resurrection/res49.htm#e>

Magnetic amplifier?[edit]

The article says that the KDF9 used 2000 toroid pulse transformers (magnetic amplifiers). Is there a reliable source that the KDF9 used magnetic amplifiers? (Pulse transformers and magnetic amplifiers are different.) The given link says that it used transformer-couple diode-transistor logic, but doesn't mention magnetic amplifiers. One source says that the KDF9 used pulse transformers to store the microprogram, which sounds a lot like IBM's Transformer read-only storage, but this is different from a magnetic amplifier. KenShirriff (talk) 00:34, 18 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed it. I don't think magamps were ever used as part of any computer other than in some power supplies. They are mentioned in our Magnetic logic article, but that really looks like something else that share some of the same principles. --Guy Macon (talk) 02:54, 18 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Reverse Polish?[edit]

There's no obvious reason in the article for the 'see also' of Reverse Polish. Why's it there? Lovingboth (talk) 16:53, 25 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I think that Fred used reverse Polish logic, but there is no reference to Fred in the article — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 19:17, 25 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]