DDP-24

The DDP-24 was a 24-bit computer designed and built by the Computer Control Company, aka 3C or CCC located in Framingham, Massachusetts. CCC consequently became part of Honeywell in 1967. The DDP-24 was completely transistorized and has a sign magnitude code to represent positive or negative numbers. The processor used binary logic. The DDP-24 used a single address command format and single operation with index and indirect addressing flags. The DDP-24 used magnetic core memory to store data and program instructions. The DDP-24 found use in Space and flight simulators of the mid-1960s and other real-time scientific data processing applications.

Peter B. Denes, a researcher at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc., installed a DDP-224 system around 1965 for use in speech research. It and a DDP-24 were used by Max Mathews, considered by many to be the founding father of computer music, to develop his GROOVE music system, as related by Professor Barry Vercoe in a 1999 MIT Media Lab interview. When asked to describe the first MIT experimental music studio, Prof. Vercoe replied, "We began that work when I first arrived in 1971. The first studio we had was in the basement of Building 26, where we had a computer given to MIT by Max Mathews-the Honeywell DDP-24. Max initially developed his GROOVE system on this machine and was kind enough to give it to MIT when I joined the faculty." The 3C DDP-24 used modules or cards called S-Pac’s. These S-Pac cards could be Flip-Flops, NAND gates, Bit Registers etc. and were housed in a DDP-24 S-Bloc card rack. An early raster-scan graphics display was developed for the computer system.