The DDP-24 (1963
) was a 24-bit computer designed and built by the
Computer Control Company
Computer Control Company, Inc. (1953–1966), informally known as 3C, was a pioneering minicomputer company known for its DDP-series (Digital Data Processor) computers, notably:
*DDP-24 24-bit (1963)
*DDP-224 24-bit (1965)
*DDP-116 16-bit (1965)
* ...
, aka 3C, located in
Framingham, Massachusetts
Framingham () is a city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Massachusetts, United States. Incorporated in 1700, it is located in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, Middlesex County and the MetroWest subregion of the Greater Boston ...
. In 1966 the company was sold to
Honeywell
Honeywell International Inc. is an American publicly traded, multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. It primarily operates in four areas of business: aerospace, building automation, industrial automa ...
who continued the DDP line into the 1970s.
Hardware
The DDP-24 was completely transistorized and used
magnetic-core memory
In computing, magnetic-core memory is a form of random-access memory. It predominated for roughly 20 years between 1955 and 1975, and is often just called core memory, or, informally, core.
Core memory uses toroids (rings) of a hard magneti ...
to store data and program instructions. It had a
sign magnitude code to represent positive or negative numbers and used binary logic. The DDP-24 used a
single address command format and single operation with index and indirect addressing flags.
Market acceptance
The DDP-24 found use in space and flight simulators of the mid-1960s and other real-time scientific data processing applications.
Peter B. Denes, a researcher at
Bell Telephone Laboratories
Nokia Bell Labs, commonly referred to as ''Bell Labs'', is an American industrial research and development company owned by Finnish technology company Nokia. With headquarters located in Murray Hill, New Jersey, Murray Hill, New Jersey, the compa ...
, Inc., installed a DDP-224 system around 1965 for use in speech research. It and a DDP-24 were used by
Max Mathews
Max Vernon Mathews (November 13, 1926 – April 21, 2011) was an American pioneer of computer music.
Biography
Max Vernon Mathews was born in Columbus, Nebraska, to two science schoolteachers. His father in particular taught physics, chemistry ...
, considered by many to be the founding father of computer music, to develop his GROOVE music system, as related by Professor
Barry Vercoe
Barry Lloyd Vercoe (24 July 1937 – 15 June 2025) was an American computer scientist and composer. Born in New Zealand, he is best known as the inventor of Csound, a music synthesis language with wide usage among computer music composers. SAO ...
in a 1999
MIT Media Lab
The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fi ...
interview. When asked to describe the first
MIT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and sc ...
experimental music studio, Prof. Vercoe replied, "We began that work when I first arrived in 1971. The first studio we had was in the basement of Building 26, where we had a computer given to MIT by Max Mathews--the Honeywell DDP-24. Max initially developed his GROOVE system on this machine and was kind enough to give it to MIT when I joined the faculty." The 3C DDP-24 used modules or cards called S-Pac's. These S-Pac cards could be
Flip-Flops
Flip-flops are a type of light sandal-like shoe, typically worn as a form of casual footwear. They consist of a flat sole held loosely on the foot by a Y-shaped strap known as a toe thong that passes between the first and second toes and around ...
,
NAND gates
In digital electronics, a NAND (NOT AND) gate is a logic gate which produces an output which is false only if all its inputs are true; thus its output is complement to that of an AND gate. A LOW (0) output results only if all the inputs to the ...
,
Bit Registers etc. and were housed in a DDP-24 S-Bloc card rack. An early
raster-scan graphics display was developed for the computer system.
[Noll, A. Michael, "Scanned-Display Computer Graphics," Communications of the ACM, Vol. 14, No. 3, (March 1971), pp. 145-150.]
External links & Bibliography
DDP-24 Instruction Manual, August 64, PDFAdams Report 1967, PDF*
References
{{reflist
Minicomputers
24-bit computers