Talk:ILLIAC IV

message: The article on Cray Inc. states that "The Cray-1 was a major success when it was released, faster than all computers at the time except for the ILLIAC IV."  But this article on ILLIAC IV states that "(ILLIAC IV) was finally ready for operation in 1976, after a decade of development that was now massively late, massively over budget, and outperformed by existing commercial machines like the Cray-1."  These two articles seem to contradict each other. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 71.50.113.68 (talk • contribs) 21:18, 25 April 2006  (UTC)
:Not only that, but the ILLIAC article contradicts itself.  It says at the top of the page that the Cray-1 was faster, but says at the bottom of the page that the Illiac began operation in 1976, the same year the Cray-1 was released with roughly the same performance.  --Blainster 08:25, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not sure I see the point in your comment? I assure you as the primary author of the article, I certainly don't compare machines based on clock speed. I thought the article was fairly fair on this. If the article reads this way, and it doesn't seem to, please edit away! Maury 04:24, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: No, I am not the author of the article.  Every one but the knowledgeable have contributed to this article (seriously).  It appears mostly a rehash of the literature and second hand knowledge that people read or heard.  Comparison is done on the basis of real codes and balanced systems.  People remember CPUs and their clock cycles, they rarely remember the other parts of systems like storage.  Too much in this article needs a rewrite for an old system which I never used which I don't have time for.... --enm 143.232.210.150 (talk) 16:07, 16 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Cray I faster or slower than ILLIAC IV?

message: This video The Illiac-IV lecture - Bay Area Computer History Perspectives Series provides a long list of the problems that the Illiac IV solved and how the results were still used beyond the life of the machine.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Nigwil (talk • contribs) 09:25, 20 October 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: What was the contribution of the Illiac IV?

message: The wording at the beginning of the "Background" section:
:... adding as many instructions as possible to the machine's CPU, a concept known as "orthogonality" ...
is incorrect, cf. its link target, Orthogonality#Computer_science. Quite to the contrary, an "orthogonal" instruction set lacks redundancy, i.e. is as small as possible for the given purpose. Would some computer scientist (I am not) kindly improve the wording? Thanks, --HReuter (talk) 01:37, 13 December 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: Orthogonality

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just added archive links to  on ILLIAC IV. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add  after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add  to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/20070610002849/http://images.library.uiuc.edu/projects/gcm/ccm/Detail.asp?Image__imageID=133&decade=All to http://images.library.uiuc.edu/projects/gcm/ccm/Detail.asp?Image__imageID=133&decade=All
When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true to let others know.
Cheers. —cyberbot IITalk to my owner:Online 05:13, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

message: As mentioned in the ORDVAC article and quoted here by Charlie Jones (discussion platform entry by Charles Richmond) on the web some (all?) of these computers used a 5 level code for encoding hex digits to 0-9 and "KSNJFL" (for todays A-F) to a punch tape. (The letter sequence was described there using memory hooks like "king size numbers just for laughs" or "kind souls never josh fat ladies".)
Here is the 5-level code used by Illiac, transcribed from THE ILLIAC
MINIATURE MANUAL, by John Halton, Digital Computer Laboratory File 260,
University of Illinois, Urbana, 1958, page 3.  I have preserved the
layout as much as is possible using ASCII:
                             THE TAPE CODE
                             -------------
           | Characters | n for 92             | Characters | n for 92
Tape Holes | F/S | L/S  |  Orders   Tape Holes | F/S |  L/S |  Orders
----------------------------------  ----------------------------------
   |  o   |    0     P         2F     |O o   |    Delay  Delay      3F
   |  o  O|    1     Q        66F     |O o  O|    $(Tab) D         67F
   |  o O |    2     W       130F     |O o O |    CR/LF  CR/LF    131F
   |  o OO|    3     E       194F     |O o OO|    (      B        195F
   |  oO  |    4     R       258F     |O oO  |L/S=Letter-Shift    259F
   |  oO O|    5     T       322F     |O oO O|    ,      V        323F
   |  oOO |    6     Y       386F     |O oOO |    )      A        387F
   |  oOOO|    7     U       450F     |O oOOO|    /      X        451F
   | Oo   |    8     I       514F     |OOo   |    Delay  Delay    515F
   | Oo  O|    9     O       578F     |OOo  O|    =      G        579F
   | Oo O |    +     K       642F     |OOo O |    .      M        643F
   | Oo OO|    -     S       706F     |OOo OO|F/S=Number-Shift    707F
   | OoO  |    N     N       770F     |OOoO  |    '      H        771F
   | OoO O|    J     J       834F     |OOoO O|    :      C        835F
   | OoOO |    F     F       898F     |OOoOO |    x      Z        899F
   | OoOOO|    L     L       962F     |OOoOOO|    Space  Space    963F
To me those code looks like being then defined by some comfortable wiring method for the keyboard - but this is just a personal guess. Sorry, but i have no good clue right now what the last column is meant to mean - not even after having a quick look into THE ILLIAC MINIATURE MANUAL by John Halton from 1958 (8 pages). (I am storing the wholte table and header words here for a better long term reference.) --Alexander.stohr (talk) 16:39, 11 October 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: These apply to the ILLIAC I (and II?), not the ILLIAC IV of this article. Maury Markowitz (talk) 20:59, 5 December 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  5 level code 

message: Everybody knows that the Illiac IV was implemented by Burroughs, and even in the late 1970s Burroughs used that fact in their public relations. I've just added a bit to the talk page of the ARPANET article quoting somebody's recollection of the plant etc. where this was done, since it looks as though it had one of the original ARPANET IMPS, back when there were only about a dozen nodes on the network. MarkMLl (talk) 07:29, 18 October 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Assembly plant etc. 

message: Just come across http://www.silogic.com/PEPE/PEPE.html which was another Burroughs super, and- curiously- one that I never heard discussed when I worked for them. MarkMLl (talk) 17:33, 10 November 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Successor project?