[Milsurplus] Curious about Military Computers such as the AN/UYK-44

[Mark J. Blair]

I stumbled over a listing for an AN/UYK-44 Data Processing Set on eBay the other day. I made an offer on it which I'm certain will not be accepted, but seeing the listing has made me curious about that computer and other similar ones:

    http://www.ebay.com/itm/230953556173

From what little I've been able to gather, the AN/UYK-44 is a 16-bit computer system made by Sperry Univac or whatever their name happened to be at the time. I gather that the CPU is on a single VME card, based on a paper I found describing a project to interface a UYK-44 to a UNIX workstation. It's not clear to me whether the system shown in the eBay listing contains a VME backplane with a single-board CPU unit inside, or if the VME card UYK-44 is an alternate implementation of the computer. Unfortunately, the eBay listing only includes a single photo of the front panel of the system.

I have found limited technical information online about this computer system and other contemporary military computer platforms. Would any of y'all happen to know if architectural information, instruction set documentation, compilers/assemblers, or even simulators are freely available for the UYK-44 or other such computers? Is the UYK-44 a repackaged implementation of some other commercially available computer system of its era? I think it's unlikely that I'll have an affordable opportunity to add such a computer to my overstuffed collection of fun junk, but I still wouldn't mind learning some more about them.


-- 
Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
http://www.nf6x.net/