Re: [TUHS] Old mainframe I/O speed

[Clem cole <clemc@ccc.com>]

Ah.  Maybe I understand where you are coming (or may be not).  What the formal marketing  names were on the street - I never much worried about.  I’ve always followed the engineering path between the teams on the inside and the technologies and never cared what the marketing people named them. 

What we now call pci was developed as the io bus for turbo laser as part of  Alpha.  It needed to be cheap, fast and expandable to 64 bits.  Intel and the PC did not have anything coming that could do that and the DEC folks knew that.  

Anyway.  You may also remember intel tripped over 10 patents in the mid 90s when Penguin magically caught up in one generation and DEC sued Intel - my favorite Andy Grove quote - “there is nothing left to steal.”  One of the patents was part of the pci bus technology.  You are probably correct that it was sourced at dec as part of the turbochannel program - I don’t remember.   But the result of the suit was that the guts of pci was licensed by intel from DEC.  I played a very very small part of it all that a long time ago.  The NDAs have probably all expired but I generally don’t talk much more about it that what I have.   

When it was all said and done AMD got the Alpha memory bus (K7 and EV6 are electrical brothers) and the industry got PCI.    


BTW.  When I came to Intel I do know there was still grumbling about license fees to then HP.   I’m not sure how all that was finally resolved but I believe it has been as part of the Itainium stuff but I’ve not been a part of any of that.  

Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite. 

> On Jun 23, 2018, at 7:57 AM, Johnny Billquist <bqt@update.uu.se> wrote:
> 
>> On 2018-06-23 13:39, Clem cole wrote:
>> PCI was a late 1980s DEC design bus design that where released via license ala the Ethernet experience of  the xerox/dec/Intel blue book.  DEC had mostly learned it lesson that interface standards were better shared.  I’ve forgotten now the name of the person who lead the team.  I did not know him very well.  I can picture his face as I said.
> 
> It's just that this sounds so much like the TURBOchannel (not Turbobus as I wrote previously). That bus exactly matches your description of details, timelines and circumstances, while the PCI, to my knowledge don't match at all.
> 
> And my recollection also matches Wikipedia, which even gives the PCI V1.0 spec being released in 1992. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_PCI)
> 
> Compare to TURBOchannel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TURBOchannel
> 
>  Johnny
> 
> 
>> Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite.
>>>> On Jun 23, 2018, at 6:32 AM, Johnny Billquist <bqt@update.uu.se> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> On 2018-06-22 20:01, Clem Cole<clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
>>>> One of the other BI people, who's name now escapes me, although I can see
>>>> his face in my mind, maybe I'll think of it later), would go on to do the
>>>> PCI for Alpha a couple of years later.   As I said, DEC did manage to get
>>>> that one public, after the BI was made private as Erik points out.
>>> 
>>> Clem, I think I saw you say something similar in an earlier post.
>>> To me it sounds as if you are saying that DEC did/designed PCI.
>>> Are you sure about that? As far as I know, PCI was designed and created by Intel, and the first users were just plain PC machines.
>>> Alpha did eventually also get PCI, but it was not where it started, and DEC had no control at all about PCI being public.
>>> 
>>> Might you have been thinking of Turbobus, Futurebus, or some other thing that DEC did? Or do you have some more information about DEC being the creator of PCI?
>>> 
>>>  Johnny
>>> 
>>> -- 
>>> Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
>>>                                  ||  on a psychedelic trip
>>> email: bqt@softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
>>> pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
> 
> 
> -- 
> Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
>                                  ||  on a psychedelic trip
> email: bqt@softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
> pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol