The CDC Cyber 170-865 Machine Room Visualisation

DtCyber is a high fidelity simulator of Control Data 6000, 70, 170, and 700 series supercomputers. The NCC version is a direct derivative of Desktop CYBER 5.5.1 created by Tom Hunter, greatly enhanced by Kevin Jordan, with contributions from several other people.

This version of DtCyber can be found on Github

A number of "ready-to-run" systems are available to use with DtCyber. Running and using these systems can be fascinating, but people doing so might wonder:

"What did these systems actually look like? How much space did they occupy? How much heat did they produce and what sort of power supplies did they need?"

There are photographs of many CDC systems on the Internet, but the detailed appearance of many items often isn't clear. The later systems (from the 1980's onwards) are particularly poorly illustrated by photographs.

Here, we are attempting to visualise the specific system configuration for the NOS 2.8.7 "ready-to-run" system which is based around a Cyber 170-865 central computer. In this way, people can see the actual machine they are using ... sort of!

In addition to the 3D visualisation, we also aim to present information about each item of equipment in the configuration -- especially its physical characteristics (such as power consumption and weight), and also its nominal cost in 1980 and 2023 US dollars ... which may be surprising!

Usage

The camera can be rotated horizontally (in "azimuth") and vertically (in "elevation") about the point it is looking at by holding down the left mouse button and dragging left and right or up and down. A single touch and drag on a tablet should also do this.
The camera "orbits" the point it is looking at (the camera target).
You can move towards or away from the camera target using the middle mouse wheel or pinch on tablets.
The camera is initially looking at the approximate center of the room, towards the central computer, at a horizontal angle of 90 degrees and a vertical angle of 65 degrees.
Double clicking on a piece of equipment will:
- Move the camera target to the center of that equipment.
- Move the camera 3 meters from that center point, keeping the viewing angles the same as before.
- Present information on the selected equipment, either as a popup scrollable dialog presenting text, or by spoken word. Which method is used is controlled by the Use speech boolean button in the small GUI at the top of the display.
If you choose to use spoken word information, you will need to allow audio output by clicking on the "muted loudspeaker" icon that will appear the first time you use this method.
There are two "virtual museum volunteers" who will talk to you in this spoken information mode: Mei and Dennis. If you double click on them, they will tell you about themselves.
If you grow tired of listening to a spoken description, you can stop it by pressing the Stop speaking button. Neither volunteer will be offended by this.
If you have red/blue anaglyph viewing glasses, you can switch to an anaglyph rendering by turning on the Anaglyph camera radio button for an enhanced 3D experience. The anaglyph and normal cameras are positioned independently of one another.
You can also adjust the camera position using keyboard shortcuts:
- f : Moves the camera away from the central computer along the long axis of the room. The camera viewing angles are unchanged. The camera and target positons are moved in 10 centimeter steps. These notes apply to all the following camera movement short cuts.
- b : Moves the camera towards the central computer along the long axis of the room.
- r : Moves the camera towards the right edge of the room, along its short axis.
- l : Moves the camera towards the left edge of the room, along its short axis.
- u : Moves the camera up, away from the floor.
- d : Moves the camera down, towards the floor.
- c : Resets the camera to the initial viewing position and angles as when the scene is loaded.
- g : Looks vertically down on the scene from a great height to give a "God's eye" view.
Pressing the Toggle ambient button will turn ambient machine room sounds on or off. These sounds were extracted from a video of a machine room containing CDC Cyber computers. They add greatly to the overall experience.

The information here, with more details about the sources used for building these models and creating the textual and spoken information can be found using the Help button in the machine room display.

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