* [TUHS] lost ports @ 2017-01-04 21:24 ron minnich 2017-01-04 21:41 ` Ron Natalie ` (5 more replies) 0 siblings, 6 replies; 16+ messages in thread From: ron minnich @ 2017-01-04 21:24 UTC (permalink / raw) So there are a few ports I know of that I wonder if they ever made it back into that great github repo.I don't think they did. harris gould That weird BBN 20-bit machine (20 bits? true story: 5 4-bit modules fit in a 19" rack. So 20 bits) Alpha port (Tru64) Precision Architecture Unix port to Cray vector machines others? What's the list of "lost machines" look like? Would companies consider a donation, do you think? If that Cray port is of any interest I have a thread I can push on maybe. 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. ron -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20170104/74fb2664/attachment.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] lost ports 2017-01-04 21:24 [TUHS] lost ports ron minnich @ 2017-01-04 21:41 ` Ron Natalie 2017-01-04 21:58 ` Larry McVoy ` (4 subsequent siblings) 5 siblings, 0 replies; 16+ messages in thread From: Ron Natalie @ 2017-01-04 21:41 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2784 bytes --] I worked a lot on the Gould SEL machines. I believe they copted George Goble from Purdue and some of his gang to do a lot of the initial OS work as the machines were dual processors and George had done the multiprocessor kernel for his “dual VAX” hack. We met with the project leading vice president, Jim Clark when they were planning this and really drove them torwards a BSD based kernel. His eyes lit up when we told him of Doug Gwyn’s SV on BSD dist which seaeled the deal. Amusingly, the SEL UNIX didn’t put a memory page at location zero by default. This should have been fine. In the PDP-11 kernel, location zero usually held the first few instructions of the program (notably a setd instruction and a few others that would cause printf(“%s”, 0) to print p&P6). The VAX BSD kernel put a zero at location zero which allowed all sorts of bugs to hide. We didn’t really mind the SEL behavior until we found a few programs that we didn’t have source code for crashing (notably Oracle). We had to put a hack in that if the a.out had a non-zero value in one of the unused fields it would put it in to “braindamaged VAX compatilibilty mode” mapping a zero at zero. This allowed us to poke the afflicted binaries. Years later a friend of mine was saying…here’s something you don’t see every day…a black computer company VP. I pointed out that I had worked with Jim Clark at Gould so there must be at least two. Turns out the article he was reading was about Jim joining AT&T. He’s still around somewhere (he’s on the board of the EAA right now). He might be a good guy to invite to the list. The BBN C machines were indeed potentially 20 bits. They were designed to be a generic hardware emulator, specifically to replace the Honeywell 516s that were being used for IMPS and TIPS at the time. They then sold someone (DARPA I suspect) the idea that they could write an instrution set that would be ideal for the C language and UNIX. I’m pretty sure that it was only doing 16 bit operations rather than 20. If I recall properly the systems were kind of klunky in practice. The Army had a few of them around. I never heard the 5 4-bit modules fit into a rack. The thing was pretty monolithic looking (about 3’ of 19” rack) and not modular at all. I did kernel work on the PA for HP also worked on their X server (did a few other X servers over the years). The hard part would be finding anybody from these companies who could even remember they made computers let alone had UNIX software. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20170104/66dc58f6/attachment-0001.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] lost ports 2017-01-04 21:24 [TUHS] lost ports ron minnich 2017-01-04 21:41 ` Ron Natalie @ 2017-01-04 21:58 ` Larry McVoy 2017-01-05 1:52 ` Larry McVoy 2017-01-04 22:01 ` Robert Swierczek ` (3 subsequent siblings) 5 siblings, 1 reply; 16+ messages in thread From: Larry McVoy @ 2017-01-04 21:58 UTC (permalink / raw) I worked on the ETA-10 (CDC spinoff, Neil Lincoln was the architect): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETA10 No idea if the code is still around, I would guess it's lost. Be fun if it showed up, I wrote a kmem "driver" so I could get my own version of ps(1) to run. As I recall, it was an ioctl that just fed me back everything I needed, it wasn't a kmem driver at all, this was my first real job after grad school and I had no idea how to write a driver :) On Wed, Jan 04, 2017 at 09:24:37PM +0000, ron minnich wrote: > So there are a few ports I know of that I wonder if they ever made it back > into that great github repo.I don't think they did. > > harris > gould > That weird BBN 20-bit machine > (20 bits? true story: 5 4-bit modules fit in a 19" rack. So 20 bits) > Alpha port (Tru64) > Precision Architecture > Unix port to Cray vector machines > > others? What's the list of "lost machines" look like? Would companies > consider a donation, do you think? > > If that Cray port is of any interest I have a thread I can push on maybe. > > 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. > > ron -- --- Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] lost ports 2017-01-04 21:58 ` Larry McVoy @ 2017-01-05 1:52 ` Larry McVoy 0 siblings, 0 replies; 16+ messages in thread From: Larry McVoy @ 2017-01-05 1:52 UTC (permalink / raw) On Wed, Jan 04, 2017 at 01:58:39PM -0800, Larry McVoy wrote: > I worked on the ETA-10 (CDC spinoff, Neil Lincoln was the architect): > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETA10 > > No idea if the code is still around, I would guess it's lost. Be fun > if it showed up, I wrote a kmem "driver" so I could get my own version > of ps(1) to run. As I recall, it was an ioctl that just fed me back > everything I needed, it wasn't a kmem driver at all, this was my first > real job after grad school and I had no idea how to write a driver :) I am apparently wrong, this has made be go through my notes. I actually wrote some drivers for the ETA project (I'm sure by copying other ones and hacking them). The ETA had local memory and then a big pool of shared memory but it was bcopy() shared. I wrote the driver that let you access the shared memory. The proc/kmem thing was driven by the fact that nlist was slow. So I wrote a driver that gave you the process table. Pretty simple. There was something called an Ibis disk, I didn't do the controller part, I did the Unix part that talked to the controller. My notes say "I wrote the Unix side of the driver which involved mapping the IOU into shared memory. Both interrupt and polled versions were used, currently the polled is used due to interrupt problems with I/O channels." All that said, I'm not a driver person, I suck at that. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] lost ports 2017-01-04 21:24 [TUHS] lost ports ron minnich 2017-01-04 21:41 ` Ron Natalie 2017-01-04 21:58 ` Larry McVoy @ 2017-01-04 22:01 ` Robert Swierczek 2017-01-04 22:01 ` Dan Cross ` (2 subsequent siblings) 5 siblings, 0 replies; 16+ messages in thread From: Robert Swierczek @ 2017-01-04 22:01 UTC (permalink / raw) I have run into interesting Unix code on the bitsavers site under bits/Unisoft and bits/SGI. In addition, archive.org has some interesting snapshots as well. I have always assumed they may be tainted in some way that discourages further exposure? Do these sites have some kind of "library" status that provides cover to host these artifacts? ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] lost ports 2017-01-04 21:24 [TUHS] lost ports ron minnich ` (2 preceding siblings ...) 2017-01-04 22:01 ` Robert Swierczek @ 2017-01-04 22:01 ` Dan Cross 2017-01-05 16:01 ` Clem Cole 2017-01-05 16:15 ` Derek Fawcus 5 siblings, 0 replies; 16+ messages in thread From: Dan Cross @ 2017-01-04 22:01 UTC (permalink / raw) Along those lines.... I once heard about a paper that was presented at some conference titled something along the lines of, "My Goodness: It Still Runs?!". The topic was some sort of early version of Unix running on some ancient piece of hardware doing some sort of industrial control. When I heard about it, a notable part of the paper was a mention that it was believed they had removed all bugs from the implementation. Not quite a lost version of Unix, but almost a lost+found version. Has anyone else heard of this paper? Perhaps it is apocryphal? I've always wanted to read it, but never found a copy "in the wild." - Dan C. On Wed, Jan 4, 2017 at 4:24 PM, ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> wrote: > So there are a few ports I know of that I wonder if they ever made it back > into that great github repo.I don't think they did. > > harris > gould > That weird BBN 20-bit machine > (20 bits? true story: 5 4-bit modules fit in a 19" rack. So 20 bits) > Alpha port (Tru64) > Precision Architecture > Unix port to Cray vector machines > > others? What's the list of "lost machines" look like? Would companies > consider a donation, do you think? > > If that Cray port is of any interest I have a thread I can push on maybe. > > 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. > > ron > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20170104/a977d5b6/attachment.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] lost ports 2017-01-04 21:24 [TUHS] lost ports ron minnich ` (3 preceding siblings ...) 2017-01-04 22:01 ` Dan Cross @ 2017-01-05 16:01 ` Clem Cole 2017-01-05 16:20 ` Clem Cole 2017-01-05 17:23 ` ron minnich 2017-01-05 16:15 ` Derek Fawcus 5 siblings, 2 replies; 16+ messages in thread From: Clem Cole @ 2017-01-05 16:01 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1510 bytes --] 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 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20170105/44c8f775/attachment.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] lost ports 2017-01-05 16:01 ` Clem Cole @ 2017-01-05 16:20 ` Clem Cole 2017-01-05 17:23 ` ron minnich 1 sibling, 0 replies; 16+ messages in thread From: Clem Cole @ 2017-01-05 16:20 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2744 bytes --] I also left out.... E.) GEM tools ran on VMS, Ultrix, Mica, OSF/1, Tru64, Mac OSx, NT/4 and later Windows version up too and now Win10 And I was just reminded that there was a 68K back-end done for it also that terminal folks used, although I'm not sure I ever saw it. Ron - for whatever its worth, the whole BLISS vs C is different history both outside and inside of DEC [which some of lived and I'll not repeat it here]. But it is sadly miss represented. I'm a C programmer and while I learned BLISS before C, I certainly prefer C to BLISS as do many of my peers - even heavy, heavy BLISS hackers I know. You should know that the compiler team was definitely BLISS based, as was the VMS group, but once Streams I/O was added to VMS and the C compiler introduced, most VMS customers left RMS I/O; while continuing to use FORTRAN as the primary VMS end-user language, BLISS was less so, C and Pascal quickly became more popular. Even at DEC, C took off, particularly in the HW teams if for no other reason than you could hire C programmers from Universities and you had to teach them BLISS. Clem On Thu, Jan 5, 2017 at 11:01 AM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote: > 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 > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20170105/1b29c68f/attachment.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] lost ports 2017-01-05 16:01 ` Clem Cole 2017-01-05 16:20 ` Clem Cole @ 2017-01-05 17:23 ` ron minnich 2017-01-05 19:08 ` Clem Cole 1 sibling, 1 reply; 16+ messages in thread From: ron minnich @ 2017-01-05 17:23 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1950 bytes --] On Thu, Jan 5, 2017 at 8:02 AM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote: > > > Cute story but not true [and I was @ DEC working Alpha at that time]. > Some facts: > Clem, thanks for the correction. This leaves me wondering why I was so naive as to believe that fable from those guys we visited ... I suspect they did not know or were just lying to me, since the question came up in the context of LInuxBIOS for the 4-socket system (2048 of them were used in ASCI Q) and I doubt they wanted to hear about non-DEC firmware on that system. The SRM was a huge pain point on that machine and we hoped to replace it with something we could live with, but it was not to be. We did get LinuxBIOS on the 1-socket pizza box thanks to Eric Biederman and Linux NetworX, which we used to build a 128-node LinuxBIOS cluster. LinuxBIOS included a PALcode implementation. Which leads to a question ... Jon Hall used to tell me that DEC used SRM in general and PALcode in particular as competitive leverage with customers (i.e. DEC-based Alpha systems always had the latest SRM and PALcode, and non-DEC-based Alpha systems were always a few revs behind). Note this implies DEC as a systems vendor was competing with DEC Alpha chip customers who were systems vendors, which was a situation we've seen in practice with many vendors that sold chips and motherboards. Anyway, the question: with LinuxBIOS, we shipped a GPL-ed PALcode implementation. It was pretty dumb, it just did 1:1 virt to phys mapping for example, but it worked. I've always believed that was the only open source or at least GPL'ed PALcode out there -- can you tell me if I got this right? Thanks, it's always good to read your histories ... sorry this is not strictly a Unix history question but I've always wondered. ron -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20170105/22a4cc5e/attachment.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] lost ports 2017-01-05 17:23 ` ron minnich @ 2017-01-05 19:08 ` Clem Cole 2017-01-05 19:16 ` ron minnich 0 siblings, 1 reply; 16+ messages in thread From: Clem Cole @ 2017-01-05 19:08 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1716 bytes --] On Thu, Jan 5, 2017 at 12:23 PM, ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> wrote: > Anyway, the question: with LinuxBIOS, we shipped a GPL-ed PALcode > implementation. It was pretty dumb, it just did 1:1 virt to phys mapping > for example, but it worked. I've always believed that was the only open > source or at least GPL'ed PALcode out there -- can you tell me if I got > this right? I have no reason to believe it is otherwise - i.e. I have no knowledge of anything else. Your comment about PALcode being used as leverage, I never saw that in practice and I worked with a lot of external folks. I think it was more of a delta-T between the time DEC engineering released the code and DEC-Semi got it to the field and the integrators into their systems. I don't think DEC systems sales tried to compete with the DEC-Semi customers, although in practice I'm sure they were not very good at being to have it both ways and certainly made mistakes. Maurice Marks was the lead techie @ DEC Semi in those days, and a colleague I used to see fairly often then. I know Maurice would have screamed pretty loud if he saw the system side of DEC mucking up his business and I think G2-Bob would have swatted folks if they had - he wanted revenue anyway he could get it. As I think you know my last DEC projects was the 1K Alpha were we spliced an EV6 into a $799 AMD based system. The DEC guys were the ones that hated it (Compaq actually liked it because Dell could not do it). Anyway, Maurice and I were shaking our heads on that one. Clem -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20170105/18422479/attachment.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] lost ports 2017-01-05 19:08 ` Clem Cole @ 2017-01-05 19:16 ` ron minnich 2017-01-05 20:08 ` Clem Cole 0 siblings, 1 reply; 16+ messages in thread From: ron minnich @ 2017-01-05 19:16 UTC (permalink / raw) On Thu, Jan 5, 2017 at 11:09 AM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote: > > As I think you know my last DEC projects was the 1K Alpha were we spliced > an EV6 into a $799 AMD based system. > That was an awesome project. I assume it ran Tru64? How did it work out saleswise? It always seemed to me you had done a great trick there of leveraging commodity mainboard economics. ron -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20170105/94565b81/attachment-0001.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] lost ports 2017-01-05 19:16 ` ron minnich @ 2017-01-05 20:08 ` Clem Cole [not found] ` <E3DA30C5-7227-4143-8DA1-401A161C74C6@gmail.com> 0 siblings, 1 reply; 16+ messages in thread From: Clem Cole @ 2017-01-05 20:08 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2676 bytes --] On Thu, Jan 5, 2017 at 2:16 PM, ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> wrote: > That was an awesome project. I assume it ran Tru64? FreeBSD and Tru64 using an non-standard (Adaptec SCSI controller) tested not 100% completed (I ran it on my desk for a bit, but there was some rough edges). Linux was proposed and should have been fairly easy. Same for NT/Alpha. It never ran VMS due to a motherboard issue with DMA and the specific disk controller VMS used [qLogic ISP], but folks could have written a new driver for it if need be. VMS could use disks on an Adaptec controller but could not boot from one, which both UNIX and Windows could; although officially Tru64 did not support the Adaptec in the SPD (because they could not support fail-over in TruClusters]. > How did it work out saleswise? Never sold - killed by a VP who I will leave nameless. All I'll say is that he was claiming that you could not make an Alpha for under $5K. From my NCR days, I knew the guy that was running consumer PC's at Compaq. And after the merger, I told Craig that the EV6 and K8 were electrical twins (not mechanical) - as DEC had licensed the Alpha memory system to AMD. He got excited and an adaptor board was built to deal with the mechanical issues. At the time, the differential cost between K8 and EV6 was a little less than $200. Craig has used at 150W over supply, all plastic case etc... System was sold via Radio Shack at the time. It was all about low cost. BTW: I still have the motherboard we used in my basement and the EV6 on my desk @ Intel. > It always seemed to me you had done a great trick there of leveraging > commodity mainboard economics. Yes, but we had "raped the virgin mother" in the eyes of the DEC big iron folks because we made an Alpha on 16% gross margins not 43% like TurboLaser. (i.e. the DEC side not the Compaq side killed it). The point is at 43% gross margins and built like a DEC system (steel cases, 400W power supply) et al, it did come to $5K; if you built it like Compaq and used Compaq margins; you could break $1K. When I got shot down after I presented to the sr folks what we did, I returned the call from a start-up the next day. A month later, was VP of Engineering at Paceline. BTW: I think that I still have the business proposal PPT somewhere in my archives (I ran into a couple of summer ago). Like bitsavers, there needs to be an archive of cool ideas that companies never had the guts to follow thru on. Oh well. Clem -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20170105/d2680e0a/attachment.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
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* [TUHS] lost ports [not found] ` <CAP6exYLvXvtGEWSg_t5bqjJwunGKC1xiiaoLj7yb5QxkHsMvuA@mail.gmail.com> @ 2017-01-05 23:40 ` Lawrence Stewart 0 siblings, 0 replies; 16+ messages in thread From: Lawrence Stewart @ 2017-01-05 23:40 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2192 bytes --] I left Digital in 1994, so I don’t know much about the later evolution of the Alphaservers, but 1998 would have been about right for en EV-56 (EV-5 shrink) or EV-6. There’s a Wikipedia article about all the different systems but most of the dates are missing. The white label parts are all PAL22V10-15s. The 8 square chips are cache SRAMS, and most the the SOIC jellybeans are bus transceivers to connect the CPU to RAM and I/O. The PC derived stuff is in the back corner. There are 16 DIMM slots to make two ranks of 54 bit RAM out of 8-bit DIMMs. We usually ran with a SCSI card, an ethernet, and an 8514 graphics card plugged into the riser. -L > On 2017, Jan 5, at 5:55 PM, ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> wrote: > > What version of this would I have bought ca. 1998? I had 16 of some kind of Alpha nodes in AMD sockets, interconnected with SCI for encoding videos. I ended up writing and releasing what I think were the first open source drivers for SCI -- it took a long time to get Dolphin to let me release them. > > The DIPs with white labels -- are those PALs or somethin? Or are the labels just to cover up part names :-) > > On Thu, Jan 5, 2017 at 2:39 PM Lawrence Stewart <lstewart2 at gmail.com <mailto:lstewart2 at gmail.com>> wrote: > Alphas in PC boxes! I dug around in the basement and found my Beta (photo attached). > > This was from 1992 or 1993 I think. This is an EV-3 or EV-4 in a low profile PC box using pc peripherals. Dave Conroy designed the hardware, I did the console ROMS (BIOS equivalent) and X server, and Tom Levergood ported OSF-1. A joint project of DEC Semiconductor Engineering and the DEC Cambridge Research Lab. I think about 20 were built, and the idea kickstarted a line of low end Alphaservers. > > This was a typical Conroy minimalist design, crunching the off-chip caches, PC junk I/O, ISA bus, and 64 MBytes of RAM into this little space. I think one gate array would replace about half of the chips. > > -L > > > <IMG_0939.JPG><IMG_0939.JPG> -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20170105/c919c32c/attachment-0001.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] lost ports 2017-01-04 21:24 [TUHS] lost ports ron minnich ` (4 preceding siblings ...) 2017-01-05 16:01 ` Clem Cole @ 2017-01-05 16:15 ` Derek Fawcus 2017-01-05 18:34 ` Pierre DAVID 5 siblings, 1 reply; 16+ messages in thread From: Derek Fawcus @ 2017-01-05 16:15 UTC (permalink / raw) On Wed, Jan 04, 2017 at 09:24:37PM +0000, ron minnich wrote: > So there are a few ports I know of that I wonder if they ever made it back > into that great github repo.I don't think they did. > > gould The Gould powernode was my first experience of unix at uni. They must have had a source licence, as in grubbing around in the filesystem, I eventually stumbled across source code - certainly for user space, I can't really recall if they had kernel stuff as well. Reading the code for ed, and seeing the internal implementation of regex's was an eye opener. DF ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] lost ports 2017-01-05 16:15 ` Derek Fawcus @ 2017-01-05 18:34 ` Pierre DAVID 0 siblings, 0 replies; 16+ messages in thread From: Pierre DAVID @ 2017-01-05 18:34 UTC (permalink / raw) On Thu, Jan 05, 2017 at 04:15:28PM +0000, Derek Fawcus wrote: > >The Gould powernode was my first experience of unix at uni. > A Gould powernode (hostname = gouldorak) was sitting in the Computing facility at my first work, with a VAX. The Gould load average was very impressive, many huge pig processes (chemical simulations) were running all time, but this machine crashed many times a week, system engineers very busy at this time (fsck, restore, etc.). The day a new Cray was installed, the main pig processes were migrated to this new machine. From this day, the load average of the Gould, which was still running, gone down. And the beast never crashed again. And system engineers were no longer busy with the Gould. Therefore, many chemists were confusing causality: they said that without system engineer, a computer works better. Pierre ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] lost ports @ 2017-01-05 12:28 Rudi Blom 0 siblings, 0 replies; 16+ messages in thread From: Rudi Blom @ 2017-01-05 12:28 UTC (permalink / raw) >Date: Wed, 4 Jan 2017 16:41:07 -0500 >From: "Ron Natalie" <ron at ronnatalie.com> >To: "'ron minnich'" <rminnich at gmail.com>, <tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org> >Subject: Re: [TUHS] lost ports >Message-ID: <01c001d266d3$42294820$c67bd860$@ronnatalie.com> >Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" ... >I did kernel work on the PA for HP also worked on their X server (did a few other X server >over the years). >The hard part would be finding anybody from these companies who could even remember >they made computers let alone had UNIX software. I worked for the computer division in Philips Electronics, DEC, Compaq, HP, HPE and still remember some of it :-) I wasn't involved in OS development, but in testing, turnover to National Sales Organisations, etc. Even now at some customer side I still have a few aDEC400xP servers from 1992 running SCO UNIX 3.2V4.2 (last update 1999). Also a few AlphaServers with Digital UNIX, Tru64; finally some Itanium servers with HP-UX 11.23/11.31. Especially the big/small endian issue gave our customer (and therefore myself) a few headaches. Imagine getting a chunk of shared memory and casting pointers assuming the 'system' takes care of alignment. Big surprise for the customer moving from Tru64 to HP-UX. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
end of thread, other threads:[~2017-01-05 23:40 UTC | newest] Thread overview: 16+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed) -- links below jump to the message on this page -- 2017-01-04 21:24 [TUHS] lost ports ron minnich 2017-01-04 21:41 ` Ron Natalie 2017-01-04 21:58 ` Larry McVoy 2017-01-05 1:52 ` Larry McVoy 2017-01-04 22:01 ` Robert Swierczek 2017-01-04 22:01 ` Dan Cross 2017-01-05 16:01 ` Clem Cole 2017-01-05 16:20 ` Clem Cole 2017-01-05 17:23 ` ron minnich 2017-01-05 19:08 ` Clem Cole 2017-01-05 19:16 ` ron minnich 2017-01-05 20:08 ` Clem Cole [not found] ` <E3DA30C5-7227-4143-8DA1-401A161C74C6@gmail.com> [not found] ` <CAP6exYLvXvtGEWSg_t5bqjJwunGKC1xiiaoLj7yb5QxkHsMvuA@mail.gmail.com> 2017-01-05 23:40 ` Lawrence Stewart 2017-01-05 16:15 ` Derek Fawcus 2017-01-05 18:34 ` Pierre DAVID 2017-01-05 12:28 Rudi Blom
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