murphy
- "anything that can go wrong will go wrong"
How and when machine obtained:
- Murphy arrived at UCC in 1977 or 1978. Club members raised $20,000 to buy the machine, by private subscription and a loan. Grants from Societies Council were also possibly also involved in the purchase.
History prior to arrival at UCC:
- Was born at UCC (?)
UCC history of machine:
-
From Julian Elischer:
Murphy was an "alpha Micro AM100" with a clone of the LSI-11 chipset. It was named after Murphy's law. The OS was AMOS and it was not really a clone of anything. (It was however quite well written.)
It was purchased from grants from the societies council from memory and put together at the club at the end of 1977. It originally had 32K RAM but we moved to 48K pretty quickly. It had several boxes made out of scrap hardware from various sources including bits of the old Gemini space tracking station at Canarvon for one of them. The final case was part of an old Burroughs (I think) accounting machine. It was timeshareing and eventually had 128K of RAM in the form of a 32K kernel section and 3 32K user banks of memeory (which were swapped in and out as the processes were scheduled. Murphy ran on an S-100 Bus.
At one stage it has a mouth painted on it in which a cigarette was always protruding.
It was the first UCC owned real machine, though we had an S100 z80 MITS (or was it an altair) machine around the same time called Edsel (after the Ford Edsel).. ("The original lemon"). Edsel ran CP/M of course.
Murphy was the soul of the club as many of the club legends and though processes started with Murphy.