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Tom - KB9ENS

@kenshirriff Standard quartz oscillator or something more exotic?

19 August at 18:57 | Wall-to-wall | Open on mastodon.radio
3 comments
Ken Shirriff replied to Tom - KB9ENS

@kb9ens I don't know the internals of the power supply oscillators. It could be a quartz oscillator, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were just R-C, since the timing isn't particularly important.
As for the computer, it is synchronized to the disk, so its clock comes from a timing track on the disk rather than a quartz oscillator.

19 August at 19:09 | Open on oldbytes.space
Tom - KB9ENS replied to Ken

@kenshirriff Woah... sounds like that would also be resilient to transient currents and restoration of time after a transient induced shutdown. As ever clever clever...

19 August at 20:15 | Open on mastodon.radio
mxk replied to Ken

@kenshirriff @kb9ens that is an interesting combination of design decisions.
The early transistor computer I am most familiar with (Zuse z23) also used bit serial logic, fixed disk (technically a drum) heads and generated its clock signal directly from the rotations of the disk.
It had a core memory register bank though and came quite a few years earlier.

20 August at 7:30 | Open on hachyderm.io
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