[inforoots] Philco 212

[Neal Laurance]

I’m new to this list, and in scanning over back issues, I found that
February is the month to offer up memories of the Philco computers. Since I
have some, and since this is February let me contribute a few.

I hired into Ford in 1960, in the Scientific Research Laboratory, working in
material science. By early mid 1961 I was spending a good deal of time
trying to analyze data using our IBM 650. So when Ford bought Philco in
1961, there were several of us very interested in the new acquisition. Many
of my colleagues started interacting with the semi conductor operations,
especially at Lansdale. I gravitated to the computer operations and made
regular visits to Willow Grove.

Reading the previous posts, one might get the impression that Ford shut down
the computer operations right after they acquired Philco. Not so. It took
almost a decade. Some time in 1962 or early 63, Ford acquired a Philco
computer for finance staff operation. It was housed in the office complex at
the Rouge plant. It ran mostly CPM type applications, but they developed
other programs for it. Philco had a decent COBOL compiler available, and as
I recall, the computer processed stockholder records.

I set out to create a MAD compiler and environment for the machine. I don’t
remember the exact time frame, but by 1965, we had a fully functional MAD
system running and serving many engineers in the company. Subsequently, I
extended MAD with some ideas from L6 and from JOVIAL, to make it a fully
capable system language. That work was presented at an ACM conference in
1968.

By 1965, time sharing became available within Ford via the purchase of a GE
265 running Dartmouth Basic. It quickly became obvious that Ford wanted to
have time sharing, but with significantly more capability than the 265's
could supply; something more like the Project MAC equipment. When things
didn’t move fast enough in the public market (and if you recall, IBM dragged
its feet on time sharing at that time), Ford decided to create its own.
Chuck Missler, then the manager of Engineering computer operations, hired
Ken Lochner and several other graduates/programmers from Dartmouth to create
such a system. They took the Philco 212 that they were presently operating
in batch mode, added a Bryant disc, and had Philco design special circuitry
so that the computer could use 65K memory. The Bryant disc was brand new on
the market, and it was huge. The disc heads were hydraulically activated,
and when it did a disk seek, the false floor shook.

The programming team looked at the situation and decided to develop the time
sharing system (almost) entirely in MAD. After it was completed and
operational, they told me that about 98% of the code was MAD, only about 2 %
machine code. That system supplied most of the time sharing computing to
Ford Engineering until the installation of the GE Multics.

After some time, the Bryant disk died, the company went out of business, and
Ford had a problem. So, someone in Philco or in Ford (I don’t know which)
designed a custom interface between the Philco and a DEC RP06. The Philco
212 ran the rest of its life (many years) on that RP06.

Some time after the startup of this system, Ford acquired a Philco 102 to be
the communications processor for the 212. The MAD compiler was modular
enough that it required only small changes to make it generate code for the
102, running on the 212. So, it too was coded in MAD.

After the system had been running for a while, Missler and many of his staff
left Ford to form Cyphernetics in Ann Arbor. There they sold computer
services on an array DEC -10s. Meanwhile, Ford turned its attention back to
GE Multics. But the Philco 212 continued to operate at Ford for many years
after the Multics system was installed.

About 1964 (my memory for these dates is not good) Philco was awarded the
prime contract for operation of the Houston space center. As part of that
proposal, Philco competed for the actual hardware contract. There were many
bidders but  IBM wound up supplying the hardware. As part of that proposal,
Philco designed and proposed a follow on machine to the 212, designated the
Philco 213. Although the machine was never built, it was fully described in
a paper by Herb Bright at FJCC computer conference in 1964.

Besides Ford, Philco computers were used in many nuclear reactor development
sites; these are the customers that CDC competed with Philco for. Philco
computers were used by Israeli military as their principal computers. Philco
actually developed a line printer that could print English left to right or
Hebrew right to left, a real novelty in that day.

Philco was the prime contractor to NORAD for the Cheyenne Mountain
installation outside Colorado Springs. I had an opportunity to tour the site
just before it went secure, but some personal conflicts prevented me from
doing it.

About 1968 or 69, Philco was still trying to get a share of the computer
market. A new computer design was developed, called the Philco 214. I was
one of the members of the review team for the project, along with Jim
Ambrose, then vp of Philco. The design was really quite exciting, and I wish
that the computer could have been built. But both Jim and I felt that the
window of opportunity for Philco had passed; the sales and marketing to
support it was no longer available, the competitive environment was severe,
and so we closed the door on Philco computer operations. Unfortunately, I
never kept my copy of the specification.

Neal Laurance


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