[TUHS] Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth, RIP John Walker

[TUHS] Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth, RIP John Walker

[Paul Ruizendaal]

> Al Kossow wrote:
> 
> > there are emulators that can still run it, along with its small library of tools and applications. “NOS/MT was left in an arrested state” as John puts it.
> 
> URL?
> 
> I've never heard of a surviving copy

Your best start is here: http://www.powertrancortex.com

The UK Powertran Cortex was quite close to the Marinchip M9900 in capabilities and John’s software was ported to it. The website has an emulator and disk images for most of the user land and “MDEX” -- a simple executive that John wrote to bootstrap his software stack. This material survived in the hands of a few Powertran Cortex enthusiasts. They also had disks for NOS/MT (binaries + sysgen), but those were found after that website was made 10+ years ago.

The Powertran Cortex design was also used to build an industrial control computer, the PP95. The UK company behind that did most of the porting work and had a complete M9900 system to do the work on. In 2018 the inventory of that company was found in a garage including that M9900 system. Also more disk images and manuals, including the NOS/MT User Manual. The disks included a few that contained reconstituted (partial) source code for NOS/MT. With a little help from John, I was able to reconstitute the remainder of the source code. All this is not online.

I will contact you off list to see how this can be best preserved.

Paul

[TUHS] Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth, RIP John Walker

[Andrew Lynch via TUHS]

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    On Saturday, March 2, 2024 at 03:54:57 AM EST, Paul Ruizendaal <pnr@planet.nl> wrote:  
 
 
> Al Kossow wrote:
> 
> > there are emulators that can still run it, along with its small library of tools and applications. “NOS/MT was left in an arrested state” as John puts it.
> 
> URL?
> 
> I've never heard of a surviving copy

Your best start is here: http://www.powertrancortex.com

The UK Powertran Cortex was quite close to the Marinchip M9900 in capabilities and John’s software was ported to it. The website has an emulator and disk images for most of the user land and “MDEX” -- a simple executive that John wrote to bootstrap his software stack. This material survived in the hands of a few Powertran Cortex enthusiasts. They also had disks for NOS/MT (binaries + sysgen), but those were found after that website was made 10+ years ago.

The Powertran Cortex design was also used to build an industrial control computer, the PP95. The UK company behind that did most of the porting work and had a complete M9900 system to do the work on. In 2018 the inventory of that company was found in a garage including that M9900 system. Also more disk images and manuals, including the NOS/MT User Manual. The disks included a few that contained reconstituted (partial) source code for NOS/MT. With a little help from John, I was able to reconstitute the remainder of the source code. All this is not online.

I will contact you off list to see how this can be best preserved.

Paul



Hi
One of the builders on duodyne implemented a TMS9995 processor board similar to the powertrancortex but with IO and memory expansion options on the parallel bus.  Mostly reusing the Z80 8-bit memory and IO (for now) but not limited to it.  We were in contact with the original authors of powertrancortex mini-cortex and it was really great to get their perspective.
The system runs Unix V6 for TMS9995 and MDEX.  Also, a TMS9995 debug monitor and I think a BASIC of some kind.  Don't know about NOS/MT since am not familiar with it but maybe it could be ported if the source is available.
If anyone is interested here it is: duodyne/20 processor.TMS9995 at main · lynchaj/duodyne · GitHub
I most use the Unix V6 since I am amazed at how well a legacy Unix runs on a retrocomputer type system.  I've seen MDEX run but really don't know enough about it to have an opinion either way.
Thanks  

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[TUHS] Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth, RIP John Walker

[Al Kossow]

Marinchip from John Walker's website
https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/marinchip/

[TUHS] Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth, RIP John Walker

[Jon Forrest]

On 3/1/2024 10:14 AM, Paul Ruizendaal wrote:
>
> For Walker, the link is via the company that he was running as a
> side-business before he got underway with AutoCAD:
> https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/marinchip/
> 
> In that business he was selling a 16-bit system for the S-100 bus,
> based around the TI9900 CPU (which from a programmer perspective is
> quite similar to a PDP11). For that system he wrote a Unix-like
> operating system around 1978-1980, called NOS/MT. He had never worked
> with Unix, but had spelled the BSTJ issues about it. It was fully
> written in assembler.

I've mentioned that I worked at Ford Aerospace in the software tools
group in 1977-1978. I had the desk next to John Nagle. One day
John had a visitor who was talking about interesting stuff so I
went over to see who it was. It was John Walker, and he was
talking about what he was doing with the TI9900 chip. I don't
remember what he said, but I do remember being quite impressed.

More name dropping - I was walking the dog on the trail in back
of my house the other day and I started talking to a guy about
my age who was also walking his dog. He said he was a retired software
guy, so I asked him where he had worked. He said that he was
one of the founders, along with John Walker, of AutoCad! His
name was Greg Lutz.

Jon Forrest

[TUHS] Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth, RIP John Walker

[Al Kossow]

On 3/1/24 10:14 AM, Paul Ruizendaal wrote:
> 
> there are emulators that can still run it, along with its small library of tools and applications. “NOS/MT was left in an arrested state” as John puts it.

URL?

I've never heard of a surviving copy