Can Anyone Identify this (Cold War?) Stuff?

An Anonymous Coward was left with some interesting pieces of hardware he would like some help identifying: "I work on the Yale Solar Racing Team. Recently we were cleaning out our electronics lab and found two ancient-looking boxes that, as the team legend says, originated in an ICBM somewhere and somehow got donated to us!"

"Can anyone tell us what these are:

• A Model 4006 PCM Decommutator (big white box, many toggle switches... it, apparently, decommutates things)
• 
  
  and
  
  
• A Model 760 Hybrid Data Measurement System (little orange box, connectors, no switches)

More to the point, for a cash-strapped undergraduate engineering team, are they worth any money?"

Comments

PCM Decommutators

[Detritus]

I am probably the only person on Slashdot who has programmed PCM decommutators. PCM decommutators are used to strip and display parameters from telemetry downlinks. They are used with satellites, launch vehicles, aircraft and missile tests, even race cars.

The model number is not familiar to me. Do you know the manufacturer?

I doubt that it is worth more than scrap. Most standalone PCM decommutators have been replaced with ISA or PCI cards that fit into a PC. These are made by Aydin, Avtec, L3 and other companies.

Some of the old PCM decommutators are interesting from a computer architecture point of view. They were very specialized computers that could process multi-megabit telemetry streams in real-time, using hardware built out of 7400 series TTL with magnetic core memory, running at a low (1 MHz ballpark) clock rate. A single instruction could input a telemetry word from a serial/parallel convertor and send it to multiple output devices. It was common to have multiple program counters, with each instruction having a field that specified which program counter to use for fetching the next instruction.