1971 Burroughs ILLIAC IV

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1971 Burroughs ILLIAC IV	by Bill Degnan - 02/03/2014 16:21
Burroughs Illiac IV back-plane printed circuit board. The chip number 1718-6263 chips are dated from 1969 and are (I think) early TTL chips similar to 1488's. Click image for larger view. Obverse / flat end of a Burroughs Illiac IV "TQ" module. Click for larger view. Side view of a Burroughs Illiac IV "TQ" module. Click for larger view. The ILLIAC IV was described in the February 1971 issue of Scientific American. Click image to enter the docs section of the site and read the article. Search the page for "ILLIAC" or sort by date and look for docs published in Feb 2014, the date this scan was uploaded. The Ebay seller of these items stated in the auction: ".. Two components from the Illiac IV computer, installed at NASA Ames around 1972. The Illiac IV, built by Burroughs, was one of the first massively parallel computers. One of the components appears to be a small memory module, about 4.5" x 4' in size. There are 20 Texas Instrument chips, laid out in 5 rows of 4, which various other discrete components included in the module. A small paper tag, "BS-21", was attached to the upper top of the module, but is now loose. This module includes the Burroughs "B" logo in the corner, as shown in one of the photos. The other module appears to be some sort of an external connector, with the label "TQ". This module, about 3.5" x 3.25", was intended to be plugged into the system, and has size small holes on the front into which something (?) was intended to be attached. The module has two circuit boards separated by about half an inch, with a large number of discrete components between the two. At one time, I was told that both these parts probably were part of an I/O or network processor that was part of the Illiac system, not part of the CPU itself. The Illiac IV was removed from the NASA Ames computer center in 1981, when it was replaced by a Cray-1 supercomputer. These components were obtained during the teardown of the Illiac IV. .. " More to come... Reply