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The IBM Engineering, Scientific and Lets take a closer look at the main processor unit in the area of the keyboard
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Instruments Computer System and keypad. The keyboard is almost identical to the IBM Personal Computer
SHARE NO. SESSION NO. SESSION TITLE ATTENDANCE
keyboard, in fact, it is electrically inter-changeable. We had an instance
Applications Division Robert Rosen HDL where a keyboard was giving us a problem, and we simply took a PC keyboard,
PROJECT SESSION CHAIRMAN plugged it in, and it ran fine.
INST. CODE
Harry Diamond Labs, 2800 Powder Mill Rd., Adelphi, MD 20783, (202) 394-2917 The second highlighted area is a 57 keys keypad that allows you, under program
control, to assign the role of those keys. You could write applications in
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which there is no keyboard required. A user could interact with the
applications from the keypad. You can put overlays on top of the key pads and
label them for whatever is appropriate for the application.
The CS9000 Microcomputer
Moving back into the machine, is the printer. You can order a machine with or
without a printer. The printer is a bi-directional matrix printer with a
Marty Sandfelder 4-color ribbon. It is also a plotter. The resolution of the printer when used
Atlanta Engineering NAD Scientific Support Center
as a plotter is 200 dots per inch horizontally and 336 dots per inch vertically
so you can resolve anything that is on the screen.
This session will cover the new IBM microcomputer, the CS9000. What I will do
today is tell you about the origins of this computing system, share with you a Moving futher back, behind the power supply and the printer, is the rest of the
hardware and software overview and finish up by talking about some of the
machine. The planar board shown here is the hart of the computer. As you know,
application areas we see customers becoming interested in with this system. you can do very little with a microprocessor - it needs a lot of other stuff
Then, I will be glad to entertain any questions that you may have.
around it. A that's what makes up a total computer system.
The IBM Instruments Computer System (IICS or CS9000) was developed, as you may
The expansion board has 5 slots and brings the bus off the planar board up to an
have guessed, by IBM Instruments, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of the IBM expansion board into which you can plug feature boards. We will talk more about
Corporation. -Their mission is to develop, manufacture, market, and service a feature boards later. There is a printer control board along the top.
line of analytical instrumentation in several major analytical technologies such
as nuclear-magnetic resonance, electron-proton resonance, electro-chemistry, and
chromotography, for example.
As I said before, the heart of this machine is the planar board. One way to
Cot understand really what this machine is all about is to figuratively walk around
the planar board. -
Recently it became clear that the trend in modern analytical instrumentation is
to provide some degree of data analysis along with the instrument. Most First is the main processor board. We have managed to put a large amount of
instrumentation produces data that is spectral in nature and requires spectral
analysis techniques which place increasing demands on the data processing circuitry and components on a very, very tightly packed multi-layer board, using
a Motorola 68000 microprocessor. This microprocessor has 32 bit registers with
capabilities of the analytical instrumentation computer.
a 16 bit wide data path. It has 24 bits for memory addressing which allows us
to directly address up to 16 megabytes of memory.
In addition, this data takes up space so you need-room for large data arrays.
You also need improved precision of internal data representation and you need
We run the 68000 with a 8 megahertz clock. The bus architecture is compatible
increased performace. Another requirement is the ability to connect to a wide
with VERSAbus* which is a Motorola standard bus architecture. A few words about
variety of interfaces, everything from RS-232 to the blue-wire/green-wire
the VERSAbus. The feature expansion socket is a full VERSAbus socket. The
interface that nobody has ever seen. For all of these reasons it became clear
expansion board discussed earlier in the presentation brings the VERSAbus
that a new kind of processor was going to be required. The IBM Instruments
sockets up off the planar board and provides a set of 5 sockets so that anybody
people went ahead and started the development program that resulted in a 68000
who makes a compatible VERSAbus feature card can plug it directly into this
based system. This is the IICS.
machine. Several manufacturers now produce boards that plug directly into these
sockets and provide Floating Point Hardware accelerators, array processors,
The CS9000 tends to have a tall narrow profile, or a small footprint. The communication functions, and additional storage.
reason for this is that in the laboratory area, desk and bench top space is at a
premium so you want take advantage of height rather than breadth. As we move around the board, we next have dynamic RAM and DBA (Direct Memory
Access). On the planar board itself we provide 128,000 bytes of Random Access
Lets take a look inside this box and see how it is put together. The main Memory. This is implemented in 64,000 byte chips. The access time for this
processor consists of several boards. There is a flat board called the planar_
board, an expansion board, and additional feature boards. There is also the
printer board, the case, power supply, printer, key pad and keyboard. *VERSAbus is a trademark of the Motorola Company.
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memory is 250 nanoseconds and we have implemented RAM with no wait states. This
provides for very quick memory data transfer. They run at a 2 megahertz maximum counting rate with 500 nanoseconds timing
resolution. Under software control you can have either pulse, 1 shot, or square
There are 4 channels of Direct Memory Access implemented on this board. The DMA wave output.
transfer rate is 1 megahertz per second. In addition, using feature boards, you
can expand dyoamic RAM in 265K increments up to 1 megabyte per board. You can The last item on the Sensor I/O card is serial communications in which we
put 5 boards in so you could add 5 megabytes of additional RAM on this machine. provide 4 additiona RS-232 serial ports which again are either terminal or modem
configuration with data rates from 50 to 19,200 baud. An on board baud-rate
The next area discussed is the CRT and graphics control section. The CRT is a generator is provided.
high resolution monochrome display, 12 inch rasterscan screen, with 80 by 30
lines in character mode. The character matrix is 7 by 14 dots in a 9 by 16 Well, so much for hardware, the nuts and bolts, letts move onto the operating
frame. An important feature of our monochrome display is the 768 by 480 pixels, system and software. The operating system on this computer is the Computing
or pels, or resolutions, fully bit mapped. We have storage in this area for the System Operating System called CSOS. This is an operating system, optimized for
acreen which is separate from user storage so it does not detract from the 128K multi-tasking real time operations. It is a full multi-tasking operating system
available to the user. In addition, enough storage is provided here for two which supports several high level languages, in particular, BASIC, FORTRAN AND
screens so you can write one screen and switch between the screens. PASCAL and we'll talk more about them in a moment. We have made direction
statements for communications, both 3101 emulation, 3270 emulation, a
The I/O capability of the planar board consists of several ports. In mathematical and statistics library and what I think is a pretty nice
particular, we have 3-RS232C ports. The baud rate goes up to 19.2KB, full-screen editor. In addition there are operating system extensions which
asyochronous ASCII coded characters. A nice feature for debugging programs is include a text editor which is more of a line editor. We had the line editor
to put a short cable from one of these jacks to the other. You can write to one before we had the full-screen editor. A macro assembler, a linkage editor, and
port and read in from another port and provide a very nice debugging tool for disk utilities.
developing telecommunication program. There is a parallel I/O section here
which provides an 8 bit group of parallel I/O with handshaking. Finally, you Let me tell you more about the multi tasking operating system. CSOS supports
can see that there is also an IEEE488 instrumentation port that is native to the multiple tasks so you can have up to 8 tasks running. Since the system task is
planar board. We support controller, listener, and talker. It uses direct a task, that only leaves 7 the way the system is currently designed. You can
memory access with a data transfer rate of 1 megahertz per second. With set priorities from 1 to 127. The system task runs at priority level 64 so you
.. software overhead that's degraded to roughly half a megahertz per second.
The next area I will cover on the planar board is the diskette control area. We
support on this machine floppy diskettes and hard disks. You can intermix up to
4 units. Either the 5~ or 8 inch diskettes, again using DMA, with a transfer
rate of about 500,000 bits per second. We also support up to 4, 5~ inch hard
could theoretically set a task to have a higher priority level than the system.
However, it you do that you had better be careful because the system may never
get control back if you don't ever let it go. CSOS is interrupt driven. We have
implemented seven levels of priority on the interrupts. Four levels of
interrupt are expanded to 32 programmable interrupts so you have a rich amount
of interrupt capability. This is a multi-tasking system so each task gets a
disks with either 5 or 10 megabytes of formatted capacity. We use the SA1000 shot at the processor of 50 miliseconds and then its rolled out for the next one
and ST506 Interface. This requires a separate control card. that is ready. The highest priority task on the ready-queue will get control
and if it's waiting on I/O it will be rolled out and other task that's on the
Let's take another look at the expansion board area. As I said before, there queue will come in. There are resident CSOS commands in ROM and there are
are 5 VERSAbus sockets and we provide some expansion features of our own. The transient commands out on the diskette.
expansion feature card is used for adding memory, as I mentioned before and you
can add up to 1 megabyte of storage in 256K byte increments so you could plug The resident system commands are SPOOLER so you cn SPOOL a file out to the
five memory cards into the system. printer and go off and do something else. a SUBMIT which allows tasks to start
up from a diskette text file, a SUSPEND which does just what its name implies -
The next feature provided for by the expansion board is the sensor I/O card it stops a task for a designated time, a TASKS command which displays the
which provides analog sensor I/O. You can have up to 4 analog ~nputs, at 30 current task status, and the TIME command for time of date.
samples per second sampling rate. It has a dynamic range of 10. The A to D
converter is an integrating converter with 12 bit resolution, polarity and over The transient commands that are provided with the operating system are utilities
range indicator, and auto zero for high accuracy and low drift. such as COPY, DISKCOPY, DISKUTIL - which is nice for looking at sectors on
diskette, a FORMAT and a HELP which gives you HELP messages on all of the
In addition on the sensor I/O card, you can have the digital input/output commands that are available to you.
feature which includes 8 general purpose debounced switch inputs, 8 general
purpose output drivers, if you want to light up LED's for example, 4, 8-bit One of the more attractive software features we think will find a lot of use by
ports for input and output, full handshake available on all the ports, fully applications developers is a common access path from any of the three
buffered input and output bits and the digitals outputs will drive 5-volt application environments BASIC, FORTRAN, OR PASCAL to the system facilities.
relays. There are also 2, 16-bit timer counters on the analog sen~or I/O board. Object code created from ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE, PASCAL, or FORTRAN can be compiled,
linked and stored starting at a particular address in the system. You could
write a program in BASIC for example and take a USER EXIT to an address at which
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