[TUHS] RIP Niklaus Wirth, RIP John Walker

[TUHS] RIP Niklaus Wirth, RIP John Walker

[Paul Ruizendaal]

Earlier this year two well known computer scientists passed away.

On New Year’s Day it was Niklaus Wirth aged 90. A month later it was John Walker aged 75. Both have some indirect links to Unix.

For Wirth the link is that a few sources claim that Plan 9 and the Go language are in part influenced by the design ideas of Oberon, the language and the OS. Maybe others on this list know more about those influences.


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.

The design was rather unique, maybe inspired by Heinz Lycklama’s “Satellite Processor” paper in BSTJ 57-6. It has a central microkernel that handles message exchange, process scheduling and memory management. Each system call is a message. However, the system call message is then passed on to a privileged “fat kernel” process that handles it. The idea was to provide multiprocessor and network transparency: the microkernel could decide to run processes on other boards in the same rack or on remote systems over a network. Also the kernel processes could be remote. Hence its name “Network Operating System / Multitasking” or “NOS/MT”.

The system calls are pretty similar to Unix. The file system is implemented very similar to Unix (with i-nodes etc.), with some notable differences (there are file locking primitives and formatting a disk is a system call). File handles are not shareable, so special treatment for stdin/out/err is hardcoded. Scheduling and memory management are totally different -- unsurprising as in both cases it reflects the underlying hardware.

Just as NOS/MT was getting into a usable state, John decided to pivot to packaged software including a precursor of what would become the AutoCAD package. What was there worked and saw some use in the UK and Denmark in the 1980’s -- 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. I guess it will remain one of those many “what if” things in computer history.


 

[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

[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]

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

[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

[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