Honeywell 6000 series

The Honeywell 6000 series computers were rebadged versions of General Electric's 600-series mainframes manufactured by Honeywell International, Inc. from 1970 to 1989. Honeywell acquired the line when it purchased GE's computer division in 1970 and continued to develop them under a variety of names for many years. In 1989, Honeywell sold its computer division to the French company Groupe Bull who continued to market compatible machines. The high-end model was the 6080, with performance approximately 1 MIPS. Smaller models were the 6070, 6060, 6050, 6040, and 6030. In 1973, a low-end 6025 was introduced. The even-numbered models included an Enhanced Instruction Set feature (EIS), which added decimal arithmetic and storage-to-storage operations to the original word-oriented architecture. In 1973, Honeywell introduced the 6180, a 6000-series machine with addressing modifications to support the Multics operating system. In 1974, Honeywell released the 68/80 which added cache memory in each processor and support for a large (2-8 million word) directly addressable memory. In 1975, the 6000-series systems were renamed as Level 66, which were slightly faster (to 1.2 MIPS) and offered larger memories. In 1977, the line was again renamed 66/DPS, and in 1979 to DPS-8, again with a small performance improvement to 1.7 MIPS. The Multics model was the DPS-8/M. 6000-series systems were said to be "memory oriented" — a system controller in each memory module arbitrated requests from other system components (processors, etc.). Memory modules contained 128 K words of 1.2 μs 36-bit words; a system could support one or two memory modules for a maximum of 256 K words (1 MB of 9-bit bytes). Each module provided two-way interleaved memory. Devices called Input/Output Multiplexers (IOMs) served as intelligent I/O controllers for communication with most peripherals. The IOM supported two different types of peripheral channels: Common Peripheral Channels could handle data transfer rates up to 650,000 cps; Peripheral Subsystem Interface Channels allowed transfers up to 1.