PDMS brochures 1976 & 1983

The PDMS brochure from 1976 can be found here:
PDMS 1976 - a set on Flickr

and the 1983 version starts here:
http://www.pdmsworld.com/forum/users/13592-albums28-4369





Technical note: Why are they in different places?

Because vBulletin offers no way to set the order in an album, and doesn't allow
enough pages to be uploaded in one batch so I can predict the order.   (If any moderator knows how to reorder them, simple alpha-numeric order is what I want.)   Flickr, although it's harder to make the text readable, does allow reordering and automatically creates thumbnails.


Mike

Hello Mike,

Wonderful stuff. Many thanks.

old is gold looking strange thanku

Very cool!

Amazingly the core still stays about the same.  Reporter/Datal still exist, the rest has new names.  I now know GROUT stands for Graphic Output...

Last page was not that legible, but I saw *** Newell name on top.  Do you know him?  Hats off to the architect.

"initial CADC implementation have been on low-cost mini-computer configurations with storage tube terminals, tablet, plotter and 60 megabyte disc."

I just saw a model that is over 70G in size!  How time has changed!

Last page was not that legible, but I saw *** Newell name on top.  Do you know him?  Hats off to the architect.

The list of names, and their position added in brackets, is:

*** Newell   (CADCentre - Project Leader)
Mark Easterfield  (CADCentre - project programmer)
Lee Barnette   (EMG/Cmp?  -  I think Lee was from Prime Computer)
Mike Causer   (Isopipe  - project tester and demonstrator)
Peter Smith   (Isopipe Canada)
Vernon Taylor   (Isopipe  - Chairman)

The date as written below the names was 3rd December 1976, and this was a meeting to present and demonstrate PDMS in Chicago.   I cannot remember who the prospective customer was that day.

We were there for a week with a Prime 400 computer (which we hadn't seen before), a Tektronix 4014 display terminal and a plotter, probably a Calcomp -- I do remember we hadn't used that model before so *** and Mark had to write a driver for it as well as rebuilding PDMS for the new memory model on the Prime 400.

35 years later I've worked for *** in two more businesses, and we're still friends -- but not without some loud arguing along the way....



Mike

[QUOTE=Kimi;55870]"initial CADC implementation have been on low-cost mini-computer configurations with storage tube terminals, tablet, plotter and 60 megabyte disc."

I just saw a model that is over 70G in size!  How time has changed!

"Low cost" is somewhat relative.  The mini-computer would cost about £250,000 and the storage tube terminals (Tektronix 4014s) were something like £25,000 each.  With the cost of PDMS software added a 4-seat installation would come to roughly £500,000.

The database in those days was very compact indeed.  There was a hard limit of 128KiB for the size of a running program, and the working part of the database had to fit in there too.  That's the reason PDMS had a dedicated database system written for it, there was no way any general-purpose DB could be made so compact.  Every effort was made to pack multiple values into each field, even at the expense of compute time to pack and unpack.  

That's also why there were so many modules instead of having a single large executable.  So to create a new pipe you would type the commands to DESCON and then shut it down to fire up GROUT to display what you'd done, then shut that down and fire up DESCON once more, or CLASHER or whatever.

All the program modules and a decent-sized demonstration design would easily fit onto the standard Prime 3MiB removable disk -- and the whole operating system and compilers, utilities etc fit into a 3MiB fixed disk too.


Mike

To think, back then we were at the cutting edge. Mainly PIPE routing with basic equipment and boxes to  represent steelwork. The whole thing was syntax driven and input blind.
You only saw what you were building when you had finished routing and switched to Grout to get a picture, and even then you tended not to bother unless Datacon and/or clasher flagged a problem. (When in doubt, Go to Grout).
Switching modules was also more cumbersome.
Each could only be accessed via Monitor, so Descon--Monitor--Datcon--Monitor--Descon--Monitor......

I sometimes wonder how keen the current generation of designers would be to learn PDMS if it was still like that today. Bearing in mind none of the other systems were as advanced at the time.

To think, back then we were at the cutting edge. Mainly PIPE routing with basic equipment and boxes to  represent steelwork. The whole thing was syntax driven and input blind.

Yes, but that was what drawing-board designers were used to.

In my view the reason it could work was that the users had come directly from years on a drawing-board.  For complex sites (such as the power stations I worked on in the 1960s pre-involvement with computers)  a pipework designer had a mental picture of where everything else was, that's all the steelwork, pipes and vessels, pumps etc, to some extent bl**dy cable-trays too.  You'd put as little non-piping on a drawing as you could, because it would take too long otherwise.  Of course you'd have a large pile of other sub-contractors'  drawings next to your board, but it was mainly a model held in the head.  So PDMS was not a lot different in that regard.

Of course there were industries where the plastic model was the design,  and I expect that users who'd come through that route found it harder.


Oh,

boxes to  represent  steelwork.

Not on my watch.   I never used PDMS to design anything that actually got built, but anything I built in PDMS had the steelwork at least as an H-section or U- as appropriate.
Part of my pre-PDMS life had involved hanging very large critical loads off someone else's steelwork, and I was very aware of the need to know which way round it was.  Also it looked better in demos -- which was a part of my PDMS life.      

I sometimes wonder how keen the current generation of designers would be to learn PDMS if it was still like that today. Bearing in mind none of the other systems were as advanced at the time.

Do designers come from a drawing board today?  Probably not.  Perhaps current PDMS should look like a video-game?     Hmmm, maybe I should ask *** Newell how his grandchildren would handle it?

Mike