Location

Honeywell Camelback Road Facility (CRF), Camelback Road & Black Canyon Freeway, Phoenix, AZ, USA.

This building was a converted discount store, located seven miles south of the main Honeywell LISD plant at Thunderbird Rd. & Black Canyon Freeway, "Deer Valley Computer Park" (DVCP).

System M moved to DVCP in 1987.

First Installed

6090 installed 11/72

Configuration: (1978)

Four 6180 CPUs,
1024K words MOS memory,
2 4 MW paging devices,
xx MSU0451 disk (150 MB each),
eight tape drives,
printer,
card reader & punch.

.. plus other equipment for System MB, including a GCOS system that ran CUESTA (see below).

Application areas

This system was run by the Multics Computer Center (MCC) organization and supported timesharing access for

• Multics developers in Phoenix
• Site Analysts and other Multics team members world wide
• General Honeywell application use
• Multics benchmarks

New versions of system software were exposed here after they had been checked out at CISL and MIT. The System-M machine was also used for final packaging and tape generation for MR releases.

System MB was the part of System M that was used for benchmark support. CPUs and other resources could be switched from one machine to the other, allowing benchmark development while service was running, and then making a big configuration for actual benchmark runs.

Site Analysts and System Administrators

The Phoenix Multics development group played a major role in supporting System M, since it was an internal development site. Frank Martinson managed the group that kept System M going.

Lacy Johnson was the main system administrator.

Operations

The people who ran System M included Conrad Barriga, Gerald Cahoon, Willie Drumm, Kay Kaiser, and Harold Van Sant.

Field Engineering

Jim Combs.

Notable developments

MRDS, the first commercial relational database product, was developed at System M by Jim Weeldreyer and Oris Friesen.

Final Shutdown

November 1993

Anecdotes

[PWB] CUESTA was the load generation software. It ran on a GCOS 3 machine at Camelback. I worked for Honeywell FSO (Federal Systems Operations) in the 77-79 timeframe doing GCOS and later Multics benchmarks, the most significant of which was the EOP (Executive Office of the President) benchmark. The EOP benchmark had a lot of word processing in it. I entered a TR about compose performance. A response from the developer of compose, Ed Wallman, likened using compose to do the tasks in the benchmark to using a 747 to retrace the first flight of the Wright Brothers. A followup mail from Ed's manager, Tom Van Vleck, suggested that a simple fill and adjust routine be written to do the job. I still have a copy of that email. One night on System MB (the benchmark system) I wrote that simple routine, and using it reduced the configuration that we ultimately bid by an entire CPU. A few months later I joined Multics development and one of my first tasks was to make that fill and adjust routine a product. It (format_document) was never widely used, but its subroutine interface (format_document_) was used by several Multics subsystems including the mail system and forum.

[PWB] The RPV of the last instance of System-M was taken apart, its platters engraved and given as mementoes to the remaining Phoenix Multicians at (by then) Bull. I have one in my garage.

[PWB] The CRF building has reverted to its original retail origins and is now "In-Door Swap Mart".

The former CRF building, with the Indoor Swap Mart sign on it.
Photo by Anthony Nemmer, Sept 2003.

[WOS, Nov 2002] I drove by the former Deer Valley Computer Park, and discovered that it has been converted (in part) into luxury apartments! The "new software building" still has a Bull sign, but the rest of the facility is long since re-used (there's a Fry's--grocery, I think--and some other mixed-use commercial, but the apartments were what really tickled me).

Written 09/20/95
Updated 07/08/99
Updated 12/15/02