Honeywell 6000 series

The Honeywell 6000 series was a long-lived family of mainframes, in production from 1970 to 1989. They were descendants of the GE 600 series family; after GE's computer business was sold to Honeywell in 1966, the 6000 series were Honeywell's replacements, using integrated circuits and large printed circuit boards, for the older (and obsolescent) discrete transistor GE machines.

The architecture of the GE and Honeywell series was the same: a tightly-coupled multi-processor, with all the CPUs sharing access to a collection of multi-port memory units.

Most 6000 series machines ran GECOS (General Electric Comprehensive Operating Supervisor); later GCOS - General Comprehensive Operating System).

Some models in the line had the additional hardware - the 'Appending Unit' (APU) - needed to implement the single-level memory used by Multics, which ran only on some models of the GE 600 and Honeywell 6000 series lines.

Generations

There were several generations of 6000 series machines, although many of the different names were more marketing gloss than significant changes. Performance improvements between the various generations were minimal.

6000 Series

The first incarnation; GCOS machines were the models 6030, 6060, 6050, 6060, and 6070. In 1973 the model 6180, which supported Multics, was added.

Series 60, Level 66 and Level 68

These were re-badged versions of the 6000 series, in slightly lower cabinets, introduced in 1975; they did, however, offer larger memory units. The Level 66 machines were GCOS, and Level 68 were Multics.

Level 66/DPS

A 1977 re-naming of the line.

DPS-8

A lightly re-engineered version released in 1979; the extensive 'lights and switches' control panels of the earlier machine were replaced with a console driven by a micro-computer. The DPS-8/M models - DPS-8/70M - supported Multics.