Talk:ICL 7500 series

Existing discussion moved from user page Ian Cairns (talk) 09:56, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

ICL 7500

I know extremely little about it beyond having seen one and having seen the programmer's guide (though only for the ICAB-02 spec), my own background having been far more on IBM kit. Is this an area that warrants expanding beyond the single mention on the template? ClickRick (talk) 23:21, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Hello ClickRick - Thanks for that. I remember the 7502 and 7503 but not 7561 (well, not yet.. it may come to mind later). These were basically terminal controllers - but were clever enough to do field validation, which could be set / instructed by the mainframe. Please feel free to add / expand as you wish. I'm just filling out this area - as per my early career. Thanks again, Ian Cairns (talk) 23:28, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

I was familiar, from the programmer's guide, with the field validation capabilities of the terminal, but was unaware of the extent of the "range". If someone else sees fit to create an article and links it from the navbox then I'll notice it and will expand with what information I have, though I have nothing from secondary sources with which to make such a start myself. I notice there is nothing indexed in the Science Museum Library's ICL archive on the subject, though that archive might be a fruitful source for other articles in the ICL area. ClickRick (talk) 07:34, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

http://cedarsgw2.leeds.ac.uk/iclarch/arch35.html lists some material which might be worth digging out. I was only looking for 7561, as that's all I'd heard of, but the search for the more generic 7500 was successful. ClickRick (talk) 15:19, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

Hi both of you, I was just looking to see who was interested in the ICL stuff and saw this. I remember those old terminals, I don't suppose they are worth too much of a mention now. I wrote a program once to generate a cartoon on them, The commands were quite slow and one could send 4K bytes to a terminal in one message so one could get about 5 seconds of animation. The program let one edit a picture for successive frames and it would generate a good minimal sequence of commands to just draw the actual changes between frames. My best one was a big foot stomping down in Monty Python's Flying Circus on a van carrying IDMS between the Bracknell and Kidsgrove sites when the project was moved. Dmcq (talk) 06:24, 5 July 2009 (UTC)