In light of the fact that only a few years back the remote computer on-line to a general computing facility was considered to be the wave of the future, with plans for such systems under vigorous discussion at many low-energy physics installations, it is at first sight surprising that there is so little progress to report at this time.
The coupled system at the University of Manitoba cyclotron is representative of what was intended at Stony Brook. At that installation, the PDP-9 is linked to the computing center's IBM 360/65 by a control unit commercially available from DEC for about $15,000. The unit connects the PDP-9 directly to a System 360 selector channel, without requiring an additional control unit. The maximum data-transfer rate at Manitoba over a 2000-foot twisted pair cable is 50k bytes/sec.
Users of the Manitoba system are pleased with the cooperation and service they have received from the computing center thus far, and they are anticipating no difficulties developing as their demands on the central computing facility increase. But while use of the coupled system for experiments other than that described is clearly possible and desirable, no information was available on plans for the future.
2. Most remote computers operate on a multiprogramming basis, hence prompt interrupts are not available. The waiting time for attention might typically be several tenths of a second, therefore the computer in the physics laboratory should be fairly powerful in order to handle the preliminary processing and buffering.
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