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* [TUHS] Burroughs funded $30,000 for a port to E-mode stack machine in 1983!
@ 2023-01-15 19:09 ron minnich
  2023-01-15 19:19 ` [TUHS] " Luther Johnson
  2023-01-16  0:51 ` ron minnich
  0 siblings, 2 replies; 4+ messages in thread
From: ron minnich @ 2023-01-15 19:09 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

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I just stumbled across an old letter, from a VP of Burroughs to me and
Steve Bartels, authorizing $30,000 for a port of Unix to the E-mode stack
machine. I had forgotten getting it.

Burroughs was famed for its stack machines. E-mode was a kind of last gasp
attempt to save the stack architecture, which failed as far as I know, see
this table:
http://jack.hoa.org/hoajaa/Burr126b.html

I worked as a hardware engineer on the A15. I also had been a Unix user for
7 years at that point and kept pointing out how awful the Burroughs CANDE
time-sharing system was, and how much better Unix was. At some point I
guess they asked me to put up or shut up. I got that money, and left
Burroughs a week later for grad school.

Funny note: A15 was Motorola ECL (MECL), and ran at 16 Mhz., considered
fast at that time.  We used a technique called "stored logic" which was,
believe it or not, using MECL RAM to map logic inputs to outputs, i.e.
implement combinational logic with SRAM. Kind of nuts, but it worked at the
time. We also used a precursor of JTAG to scan it in. Those of you who know
JTAG have some idea of how fun this had to be.

One side effect of working with MECL is you realized just how well designed
the TI 7400 SSI/MSI parts were ... MECL always just felt like an awkward
family to design with.

Another funny story, pointing to what was about to happen to Burroughs. We
had an app that ran for hours on the stack machine. We quick ported it to a
VAX, started it up, and headed out to lunch -- "this will take a while,
let's go eat." We got to the front door and: "Oh, wait, let me hop back
into the office,I  forgot my jacket". And, noticed, the program was done in
... about 3 minutes. Not 8 hours.

That's when we knew it was game over for Burroughs.

If a picture of this letter would be useful in some archive somewhere, let
me know, I can send it.

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 4+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Burroughs funded $30,000 for a port to E-mode stack machine in 1983!
  2023-01-15 19:09 [TUHS] Burroughs funded $30,000 for a port to E-mode stack machine in 1983! ron minnich
@ 2023-01-15 19:19 ` Luther Johnson
  2023-01-16  0:51 ` ron minnich
  1 sibling, 0 replies; 4+ messages in thread
From: Luther Johnson @ 2023-01-15 19:19 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

Well, FPGAs use SRAM-based look-up tables to do their combinational 
logic functions - so not that crazy - if it works and gives good enough 
results for the task at hand, people will find ways of using the 
technique. But I imagine there were a host of other things that weren't 
done as well as possible that added up to 8 hours vs. 3 minutes.

On 01/15/2023 12:09 PM, ron minnich wrote:
> I just stumbled across an old letter, from a VP of Burroughs to me and 
> Steve Bartels, authorizing $30,000 for a port of Unix to the E-mode 
> stack machine. I had forgotten getting it.
>
> Burroughs was famed for its stack machines. E-mode was a kind of last 
> gasp attempt to save the stack architecture, which failed as far as I 
> know, see this table:
> http://jack.hoa.org/hoajaa/Burr126b.html
>
> I worked as a hardware engineer on the A15. I also had been a Unix 
> user for 7 years at that point and kept pointing out how awful the 
> Burroughs CANDE time-sharing system was, and how much better Unix was. 
> At some point I guess they asked me to put up or shut up. I got that 
> money, and left Burroughs a week later for grad school.
>
> Funny note: A15 was Motorola ECL (MECL), and ran at 16 Mhz., 
> considered fast at that time.  We used a technique called "stored 
> logic" which was, believe it or not, using MECL RAM to map logic 
> inputs to outputs, i.e. implement combinational logic with SRAM. Kind 
> of nuts, but it worked at the time. We also used a precursor of JTAG 
> to scan it in. Those of you who know JTAG have some idea of how fun 
> this had to be.
>
> One side effect of working with MECL is you realized just how well 
> designed the TI 7400 SSI/MSI parts were ... MECL always just felt like 
> an awkward family to design with.
>
> Another funny story, pointing to what was about to happen to 
> Burroughs. We had an app that ran for hours on the stack machine. We 
> quick ported it to a VAX, started it up, and headed out to lunch -- 
> "this will take a while, let's go eat." We got to the front door and: 
> "Oh, wait, let me hop back into the office,I  forgot my jacket". And, 
> noticed, the program was done in ... about 3 minutes. Not 8 hours.
>
> That's when we knew it was game over for Burroughs.
>
> If a picture of this letter would be useful in some archive somewhere, 
> let me know, I can send it.
>
>


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 4+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Burroughs funded $30,000 for a port to E-mode stack machine in 1983!
  2023-01-15 19:09 [TUHS] Burroughs funded $30,000 for a port to E-mode stack machine in 1983! ron minnich
  2023-01-15 19:19 ` [TUHS] " Luther Johnson
@ 2023-01-16  0:51 ` ron minnich
  2023-01-16  1:59   ` Lawrence Stewart
  1 sibling, 1 reply; 4+ messages in thread
From: ron minnich @ 2023-01-16  0:51 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

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https://web.archive.org/web/20130521183231/http://jack.hoa.org/hoajaa/BurrMain.html

has the burroughs info.

On Sun, Jan 15, 2023 at 11:09 AM ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:

> I just stumbled across an old letter, from a VP of Burroughs to me and
> Steve Bartels, authorizing $30,000 for a port of Unix to the E-mode stack
> machine. I had forgotten getting it.
>
> Burroughs was famed for its stack machines. E-mode was a kind of last gasp
> attempt to save the stack architecture, which failed as far as I know, see
> this table:
> http://jack.hoa.org/hoajaa/Burr126b.html
>
> I worked as a hardware engineer on the A15. I also had been a Unix user
> for 7 years at that point and kept pointing out how awful the Burroughs
> CANDE time-sharing system was, and how much better Unix was. At some point
> I guess they asked me to put up or shut up. I got that money, and left
> Burroughs a week later for grad school.
>
> Funny note: A15 was Motorola ECL (MECL), and ran at 16 Mhz., considered
> fast at that time.  We used a technique called "stored logic" which was,
> believe it or not, using MECL RAM to map logic inputs to outputs, i.e.
> implement combinational logic with SRAM. Kind of nuts, but it worked at the
> time. We also used a precursor of JTAG to scan it in. Those of you who know
> JTAG have some idea of how fun this had to be.
>
> One side effect of working with MECL is you realized just how well
> designed the TI 7400 SSI/MSI parts were ... MECL always just felt like an
> awkward family to design with.
>
> Another funny story, pointing to what was about to happen to Burroughs. We
> had an app that ran for hours on the stack machine. We quick ported it to a
> VAX, started it up, and headed out to lunch -- "this will take a while,
> let's go eat." We got to the front door and: "Oh, wait, let me hop back
> into the office,I  forgot my jacket". And, noticed, the program was done in
> ... about 3 minutes. Not 8 hours.
>
> That's when we knew it was game over for Burroughs.
>
> If a picture of this letter would be useful in some archive somewhere, let
> me know, I can send it.
>
>
>

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 4+ messages in thread

* [TUHS] Re: Burroughs funded $30,000 for a port to E-mode stack machine in 1983!
  2023-01-16  0:51 ` ron minnich
@ 2023-01-16  1:59   ` Lawrence Stewart
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 4+ messages in thread
From: Lawrence Stewart @ 2023-01-16  1:59 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: ron minnich; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

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I rise to defend the honor of ECL.  I had designed with TTL through college and the ‘80s: network cards, graphics controllers, the Etherphone, the CPU modules for the Firefly MicroVAX multiprocessor, and so forth.  My early designs were SSI and later ones PAL based mostly (Like in Soul of the New Machine).  In 1990 or 1991 Digital Systems Research Center started work on the Alpha Demonstration Unit, intended for software porting.  The Alpha EV-3 and EV-4 were I/O compatible with either TTL or ECL levels, so we chose ECL 100K with some of the new ECLinPS stuff and even some custom Gallium Arsenide address drivers for the DRAM arrays.  This all let the system run at 100 MHz, to keep up with the 100 or 200 MHz Alphas.

The short version is that if you can afford the power, ECL is <awesome>.  Every wire is a transmission line. Every signal is terminated. Almost every part (except the 5 NS cache rams) has complementary outputs.  What’s not to like about 350 ps NOR gates? The signal integrity alone makes it worthwhile. The CACM paper is at https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/151220.151225 <https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/151220.151225> but the Digital Technical Journal version is on Bitsavers at http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/dtj/dtj_v04-04_1992.pdf <http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/dtj/dtj_v04-04_1992.pdf>

Naturally all the production systems were TTL and CMOS, but that ECL stuff was great fun.  We had a local welding shop make 18” cables for the 400 Amps of -4.5v and 200 Amps of -2v terminator power.  They said “what kind of a welder is this for anyway?

The Unix angle, such as it is, is that the ADU ran OSF-1 and Alpha VMS <at the same time> on different subsets of the CPU and memory boards.  Not a hypervisor, but a hard partitioning of resources.  There was enough I/O stuff to run three “computers” I think.

Earlier I had been a user of the Xerox Dorado, which was 16 MHz ECL (probably MECL) in the early 80’s.  It made a wonderful personal computer :).  Ken Pier’s retrospective at http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/xerox/parc/techReports/ISL-83-1_A_Retrospective_on_the_Dorado_A_High-Performance_Personal_Computer.pdf <http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/xerox/parc/techReports/ISL-83-1_A_Retrospective_on_the_Dorado_A_High-Performance_Personal_Computer.pdf> talks a bit about debugging on page 32.  The Dorado had JTAG like scan logic threaded through it, which made debugging and repair of such a complex beast possible.  IIRC quite a lot of work went into the control software for the scan logic, devoting an Alto to having a decent UI for it.

-Larry

> On 2023, Jan 15, at 7:51 PM, ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> https://web.archive.org/web/20130521183231/http://jack.hoa.org/hoajaa/BurrMain.html <https://web.archive.org/web/20130521183231/http://jack.hoa.org/hoajaa/BurrMain.html>
> 
> has the burroughs info.
> 
> On Sun, Jan 15, 2023 at 11:09 AM ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com <mailto:rminnich@gmail.com>> wrote:
> I just stumbled across an old letter, from a VP of Burroughs to me and Steve Bartels, authorizing $30,000 for a port of Unix to the E-mode stack machine. I had forgotten getting it.
> 
> Burroughs was famed for its stack machines. E-mode was a kind of last gasp attempt to save the stack architecture, which failed as far as I know, see this table:
> http://jack.hoa.org/hoajaa/Burr126b.html <http://jack.hoa.org/hoajaa/Burr126b.html>
> 
> I worked as a hardware engineer on the A15. I also had been a Unix user for 7 years at that point and kept pointing out how awful the Burroughs CANDE time-sharing system was, and how much better Unix was. At some point I guess they asked me to put up or shut up. I got that money, and left Burroughs a week later for grad school. 
> 
> Funny note: A15 was Motorola ECL (MECL), and ran at 16 Mhz., considered fast at that time.  We used a technique called "stored logic" which was, believe it or not, using MECL RAM to map logic inputs to outputs, i.e. implement combinational logic with SRAM. Kind of nuts, but it worked at the time. We also used a precursor of JTAG to scan it in. Those of you who know JTAG have some idea of how fun this had to be.
> 
> One side effect of working with MECL is you realized just how well designed the TI 7400 SSI/MSI parts were ... MECL always just felt like an awkward family to design with. 
> 
> Another funny story, pointing to what was about to happen to Burroughs. We had an app that ran for hours on the stack machine. We quick ported it to a VAX, started it up, and headed out to lunch -- "this will take a while, let's go eat." We got to the front door and: "Oh, wait, let me hop back into the office,I  forgot my jacket". And, noticed, the program was done in ... about 3 minutes. Not 8 hours. 
> 
> That's when we knew it was game over for Burroughs. 
> 
> If a picture of this letter would be useful in some archive somewhere, let me know, I can send it.
> 
> 


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2023-01-15 19:09 [TUHS] Burroughs funded $30,000 for a port to E-mode stack machine in 1983! ron minnich
2023-01-15 19:19 ` [TUHS] " Luther Johnson
2023-01-16  0:51 ` ron minnich
2023-01-16  1:59   ` Lawrence Stewart

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