Item Details

Description

The G. Edward Bryan collection on the CP- 6 system contains material on the Honeywell CP-6 operating system and the team that built it at the Los Angeles Development Center (LADC). The LADC was established in 1976 to develop a CP-V backward compatible successor, the CP-6, to attract Xerox CP-V users to Honeywell machines. The LADC team was a hybrid of Xerox programmers and Honeywell management, with Bryan as its director. The “Honeywell CP-6 project” series is primarily made up of records created at the LADC starting in 1976 when the project began until 1992 when support for CP-6 was transferred to ACTC Technologies in Canada. LADC administrative records and materials relating to the development and releases of CP-6 make up the bulk of this series, which also includes publications, and presentation materials. Collection highlights in the LADC administrative records include Bryan’s notebooks, calendars, and dayplanners and various forms of original artwork from LADC employees that document the frustration that many LADC members felt over the Honeywell-Bull merger and the end of CP-6. Also included in the “Honeywell CP-6 project” series are promotional material, press, manuals, and conference and presentation materials. The non-CP-6 series in the collection contain Honeywell administrative records and publications related to other projects and products. A significant portion of the collection includes materials created at Scientific Data Systems (SDS) and Xerox Data Systems (XDS) documenting the Universal Time-Sharing System (UTS) and CP-V – both of which were the main predecessors to Honeywell’s CP-6 system in terms of architecture and user base. One other company where Bryan worked that is prevalent in the collection is the RAND Corporation. The materials from RAND are primarily from the 1960s and focus on the JOHNNIAC computer and JOSS programming language. Other companies and publications represented in the non-CP-6 series include IBM, and to a lesser extent, the Control Data Corporation (CDC), Philco, General Electric (GE), Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), and several volumes of the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Biographical/Historical Note G. Edward Bryan received his BS in electrical engineering from Caltech in 1954 and an MS-level certificate in communications from Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1957. He worked in system design and engineering at Bell from 1954 to 1960, then worked at the RAND Corporation’s Computer Sciences Department (also known as the RAND Computation Center) until 1967, where he was on the design team that developed the JOSS-II time-sharing programming language. After RAND, Bryan worked at Scientific Data Systems (SDS) as the manager of operating systems development. SDS was acquired by Xerox and renamed Xerox Data Systems (XDS) in 1969; Bryan continued to work there as a computer scientist on the programming development team that worked on the CP-V operating system for Xerox’s Sigma system of computers. CP-V was released in 1973, but by 1975, Xerox decided to leave the computer business and Honeywell Inc. acquired XDS and around 60 programmers from the CP-V development team, including Bryan, in 1976. Honeywell also acquired Xerox’s Sigma user base and pledged to continue supporting the Sigma line as they developed an updated and improved version of CP-V that would be nearly identical to the Sigma operating system but operational only on Honeywell machines. They called this operating system CP-6, and it would allow Xerox customers to migrate from their Sigma computers to Honeywell’s own computers with relative ease. CP-6 could be used with Honeywell’s Level 66, DPS 8, DPS 8000, and DPS 90. Honeywell opened the Los Angeles Development Center (LADC) in 1976 as the center of operations for CP-6 development. As an LADC director, Bryan oversaw the programmers who would create CP-6 in just three years, a development rate that Bryan noted was twice as fast with half the errors as comparable software projects. CP-6 was designed using the programming language PL-6, which was developed by LADC specifically for the project. The first Sigma customer to implement CP-6 was Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, in 1979, and eventually they gained more than 70 CP-6 customers. In 1987, Honeywell, NEC (Nippon Electric Company), and Groupe Bull merged to create Honeywell Bull. The new company decided to refocus its efforts and phase out the development of CP-6. Honeywell Bull was consolidated into Groupe Bull in 1988 and the name was changed to Bull HN in 1989. That same year, it was announced that LADC would be closing and support for CP-6 would move to the Canadian company ACTC Technologies Inc., which was partially owned by Bull. Before the shutdown, Bryan considered and proposed several alternatives that would save LADC, such as transforming it into a business independent of Bull and proposing the acquisition of LADC and its staff to several companies. Ultimately, Bull decided to keep LADC open during the transition of CP-6 support to ACTC, retaining essential staff and laying off others. Ten to 12 programmers, including Bryan, stayed on under a two-year contract to train the ACTC staff in the support and maintenance of CP-6 from 1990 to 1992. Before the LADC contracts ended, Bryan sent letters and resumes to other companies in an attempt to keep his CP-6 team together, or at the very least employed. In December of 1992, LADC closed for good and the staff that did not continue to contract with ACTC were laid off. Bryan took an early retirement from Bull. CP-6 remained in operation and supported by ACTC until 2005, when the last system was shut down at Carleton University, the first site to implement it. Bryan died July 9, 2014.

Level of description

Folder

Date

1955-2005, 1965-1992

Publisher

Computer History Museum (Publisher)

Extent

60.84 linear feet in 45 record cartons, 4 manuscript boxes and 2 oversize boxes

Subject

Honeywell, International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), JOHNNIAC Computer, Operating Systems (Computers), Rand Corporation, Scientific Data Systems (SDS), Xerox Corporation

Collection title

G. Edward Bryan collection on the CP-6 system

Credit

Gift of G. Edward Bryan

Catalogue number

102733957

Lot number

X2901.2005