Launch of project "Charlie"
1967
As a conservative measure to keep some engineeris on board, BULL-General Electric
, with GE agreement, assigned to Pierre DAVOUS assisted by Georges LEPICARD (Lepicar@world-net.sct.fr) an exploratory
mission to specify a line of medium sized machines that could be sold competitively with IBM 360 –the IBM
product line then emerging as a definitive success–. That line of products would have to be
micro-programmed, a technique that the Bull team was the only one having experimented inside
GE with the projects of M40 and GE140. This project received the name of "Project CHARLIE".
A research team of around 20 French people was joined by 2 Americans from Phoenix engineering,
noticeably Izzy EPSTEIN . Some basic design options of the DPS7 have been taken during this study.
Particularly, itwas decided to have an architecture now known as CISC using 32 bits registers à la S/360
and to introduce some MULTICS segmentation features. It was also considered that real-time
transactional applications should merit a firmware implementation of the process dispatching
mechanism. A first draft of the instruction code set was established. Several models were
contemplated differing by the width of their data path.
During this period, GE hired an ex-IBMer, John HAANSTRA, as vice-president for
Strategy. He took a direct interest in the design options of the CHARLIE project.
John HAANSTRA recommended that the peripheral controllers (PCP Peripheral Control Processors)
be micro-programmed, avoiding special logic as much as possible, and the Bull URC -- that was later
followed by its cousins like the Phoenix MPC and the NEC URP, was initiated by Henri VERDIER team
on the base of J.HAANSTRA recommendations. In parallel, technology studies wereinitiated: while
the choice of integrated circuits was obvious (RCA had already shipped its Spectra70 line) several
solutions were available for the transistors types. GE had started in Schenectady the study of CML –
a variant of ECL, slightly less power-hungry– and CML was a candidate for the new line of systems.
follow-on: L-178