[TUHS] lost ports

[clemc@ccc.com (Clem Cole)]

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​below...​

On Wed, Jan 4, 2017 at 4:24 PM, ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> wrote:

> but another true story: I visited DEC in 2000 or so, as LANL was about to
> spend about $120M on an Alpha system. The question came up about the SRM
> firmware for Alpha. As it was described to me, it was written in BLISS and
> the only machine left that could build it was an 11/750, "somewhere in the
> basement, man, we haven't turned that thing on in years". I suspect there's
> a lot of these containing oxide oersteds of interest.


​Cute story but not true [and I was @ DEC working Alpha at that time].
Some facts:

A.) The SRM firmware was in C primary and Assembler and used >>UNIX<< tools
not VMS tools for development
B.) The GEM compiler (which still exists and still being developed by VMSI)
had front ends for at least (which I remember):   BLISS, C, PL/1, Pascal,
ADA, FORTRAN​, Cobol, RPG and a few others (I'll try to ask if I see any of
the old GEM guys in the Cafe' in the next few hours - they are dying off
BTW - but that's a different story).
C.) The GEM compiler has backends for,  Vax, Galaxy, MIPS, Alpha, x86
(32bit), ia64, INTEL*64 (post DEC/Compaq/HP) and I believe also ARM (I'll
need to ask if the VMSI folks come to lunch on Friday).
D.) Alpha's ran UNIX before they ran VMS BTW.  The HW debug was all UNIX.

Clem
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