Harris HCX Computers

[Charles Richmond]

Has anyone here heard of or used a Harris HCX machine??? I could find
precious little on the internet about these machines. These computers were
designed from the ground up to run a version of Unix. ISTM that Harris
bought out the original company that developed the machines. At a PPoE back
in the 1980's, I had an opportunity to use an HCX-5 for a while.

I found an ad for a Harris HCX-5 in the new products section of a magazine
(actually an Acrobat .pdf file of that section). I put the ad for the
Harris HCX-5 on a web page. Take a look and see if you recognize the
machine:

http://www.aquaporin4.com/hcx5/

--
+<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>+
| Charles Richmond nume...@aquaporin4.com |
+<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>+

[dsgrace]

That looks like an ad from 'Unix World', the kind you'd see in the early
1980s when
everybody & their brother was introducing MC68000 based superminin's that
were
going to eat DECs lunch. Companies had red/white/blue names like Victory,
Eagle,
Fortune (a bone white desktop system, Unix-on-a-floppy). Zilog had been
bought
by Chevron/Exxon (or whatever they called themselves then) who were going to
get
into high-tech in a big way and they were pushing the Z8000 but the venture
capital
money was going with Motorola.

Story was most of these companies merely bought boards from SUN and
then tricked them out as mini's. You'd see these people sometimes set up at
those
Norm de Nardi computer shows they'd have at the high-rise Hyatt on El Camino
across
from Ricki's Hyatt at Arastradero/Charleston. This was the early days of
Sand Hill Road
and some of these young engineers (once saw a bearded guy wearing a suit
only b/cause
his company had a booth holding a board the size of cookie sheet and
exclaiming in
absolute amazement: "This is a *megabyte* of RAM!") would become instant
millionaires when their redwhiteblue company went public. The President of
Eagle was
essentially millionaire-for-a-day, he bought a Ferrari in Los Gatos with
his IPO $$ and
flew over a cliff on the drive back to Palo Alto.

But probably many companies (like Harris maybe) took out ads with a 'Circle
Reader
Service Card #nnn' to see how large the potential market was before ever
committing
to an actual product. Find a library that has back issues of 'Unix World'
and dig around.
About 1983/4 literally everybody was claiming
'unix.vme.32bit.tcpip.uucp.blahblahblah':
IBM (AIX), PerkinElmer, HP (had a custom 32-bit cpu workstation, story was
Bill Joy
never got his PhD because HP paid him so much to do the Unix port just
before SUN
got founded & he just never got back across the San Mateo bridge to Cal),
Zilog ZEUS
(ZilogEnhancedUnixSystem), (ok, not DEC: "one architecture, one OS"); there
were a
couple of Unix-porting houses, pretty sure SCO was one but can't remember
name of
the big one, HCR or UniSoft or Interactive maybe . . . too many acronyms
muddled
together in the old brain.

Oh yeah, Radio Shack sold something called Xenix from a company named
Microsoft.

And all the "Unix-like" systems: Idris/Coherent/Cromix/. . . About the only
book on Unix
at that time was the Thomas/Yeats one and (Thomas or Yeats or both) would
write in
'Unix World' about how Unix was about to take over the World so get out of
the way
before you get swamped. About the time somebody in Seattle bought a cp/m
clone for
the x86.

(just Googled 'de nardi computer', found this from December 1981: "de
Nardi seemed
surprised at the attendance of 4000. 'I guess people are just very
interested in computers,'
he said")

All this "thinking" hurts the brain, going back to sleep now . . .

"Charles Richmond" <net...@aquaporin4.com> wrote in message
news:jkhtum$4do$1...@dont-email.me...

[Anne & Lynn Wheeler]

"dsgrace" <x...@x.net> writes:
> But probably many companies (like Harris maybe) took out ads with a
> Circle Reader Service Card #nnn' to see how large the potential market
> was before ever committing to an actual product. Find a library that
> has back issues of 'Unix World' and dig around. About 1983/4
> literally everybody was claiming
> unix.vme.32bit.tcpip.uucp.blahblahblah': IBM (AIX), PerkinElmer, HP
> (had a custom 32-bit cpu workstation, story was Bill Joy never got his
> PhD because HP paid him so much to do the Unix port just before SUN
> got founded & he just never got back across the San Mateo bridge to
> Cal), Zilog ZEUS (ZilogEnhancedUnixSystem), (ok, not DEC: "one
> architecture, one OS"); there were a couple of Unix-porting houses,
> pretty sure SCO was one but can't remember name of the big one, HCR or
> UniSoft or Interactive maybe . . . too many acronyms muddled together
> in the old brain.

reference to early 801/risc in this recent post mentioning ACS in
ibm-main mailing list
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2012d.html#74 Execution Velocity

in 80 time-frame there was effort to replace a large variety of internal
microprocessors with 801/risc (mostly iliad) ... which all floundered
for one reason or another. some old 801/risc email
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#801

in the early 80s, with the floundering of these 801/risc conversion
efforts ... some number of the people involved left and went to work on
risc chip efforts at other companies (i think at least amd 29k and hp
snake).

there was another 801/risc, "romp" chip that was going to be used for
the follow-on to the displaywriter. when that got canceled, they decided
to reposition it to unix workstation market. they got the company that
had done port of at&t unix to ibm/pc (pc/ix) to do a port to romp ...
announced as pc/rt and aix v2 (i think label on pc/ix box said something
like "pc/ix by interactive").

there was a group in palo alto that had been working on bsd "unix" port
to mainframe 370 ... but that got redirected to the pc/rt ... coming out
as "aos" for pc/rt (alternative to aix v2). palo alto as eventually did
port of ucla locus "unix work-alike" to 370 & ibm/pc ... coming out as
aix/370 & aix/386 (but totally different from the aix v2 for the pc/rt).

people that were doing sun ... came to ibm about producing sun
workstation. there was meeting in palo alto ... included some number of
groups around the company ... all of which said they were doing
something better than "sun" ... so ibm declined (and the people involved
decided to found their own company).

misc. past posts mentioning 801/risc:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#801

perkin-elmer had bought interdata and was marketing the boxes under
their own logo. interdata had been early (1st) non-pdp port of unix.

i had run into interdata/3 as undergraduate in the 60s ... also
mentioned in the ibm-main post.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

[Ahem A Rivet's Shot]

On Fri, 23 Mar 2012 18:33:30 -0700
"dsgrace" <x...@x.net> wrote:

> That looks like an ad from 'Unix World', the kind you'd see in the early
> 1980s when
> everybody & their brother was introducing MC68000 based superminin's that
> were
> going to eat DECs lunch.

Yep, I recall going to trade shows where more than half the stands
were showing off boxes that had a QIC drive on the front, a bunch of RS232
ports on the back and a 68K inside running some flavour of unix. From around
that time I recall the phrase "It's not a bloody fridge".

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith | Directable Mirror Arrays
C:>WIN | A better way to focus the sun
The computer obeys and wins. | licences available see
You lose and Bill collects. | http://www.sohara.org/

[Walter Bushell]

In article <20120324120042....@eircom.net>,

Ahem A Rivet's Shot <ste...@eircom.net> wrote:

> On Fri, 23 Mar 2012 18:33:30 -0700
> "dsgrace" <x...@x.net> wrote:
>
> > That looks like an ad from 'Unix World', the kind you'd see in the early
> > 1980s when
> > everybody & their brother was introducing MC68000 based superminin's that
> > were
> > going to eat DECs lunch.
>
> Yep, I recall going to trade shows where more than half the stands
> were showing off boxes that had a QIC drive on the front, a bunch of RS232
> ports on the back and a 68K inside running some flavour of unix. From around
> that time I recall the phrase "It's not a bloody fridge".

And they were fine for data entry, but apparently died when someone
tried to compile on one. At least that was the experience where I was
working, or perhaps those of one of our vendors.

--
This space unintentionally left blank.

[Charles Richmond]

"Ahem A Rivet's Shot" <ste...@eircom.net> wrote in message
news:20120324120042....@eircom.net...

> On Fri, 23 Mar 2012 18:33:30 -0700
> "dsgrace" <x...@x.net> wrote:
>
>> That looks like an ad from 'Unix World', the kind you'd see in the early
>> 1980s when
>> everybody & their brother was introducing MC68000 based superminin's that
>> were
>> going to eat DECs lunch.
>
> Yep, I recall going to trade shows where more than half the stands
> were showing off boxes that had a QIC drive on the front, a bunch of RS232
> ports on the back and a 68K inside running some flavour of unix. From
> around
> that time I recall the phrase "It's not a bloody fridge".
>

I know for a fact that the HCX-5 did *not* have a 68K inside. I read some
of their manuals. The instruction set of the cpu was tailored to running C
programs. There was a *single* instruction that did what strlen() did... it
took an address from a register and read down memory until it found a null
byte. It returned the byte count of the string in another register. So you
68K Unix folks need to guess again...

[Charles Richmond]

>"dsgrace" <x...@x.net> wrote in message
>news:6OOdnTJwCbjsufDS...@earthlink.com...

> "Charles Richmond" <net...@aquaporin4.com> wrote in message
> news:jkhtum$4do$1...@dont-email.me...
>> Has anyone here heard of or used a Harris HCX machine??? I could find
>> precious little on the internet about these machines. These computers
>> were designed from the ground up to run a version of Unix. ISTM that
>> Harris bought out the original company that developed the machines. At a
>> PPoE back in the 1980's, I had an opportunity to use an HCX-5 for a
>> while.
>>
>> I found an ad for a Harris HCX-5 in the new products section of a
>> magazine (actually an Acrobat .pdf file of that section). I put the ad
>> for the Harris HCX-5 on a web page. Take a look and see if you recognize
>> the machine:
>>
>> http://www.aquaporin4.com/hcx5/
>>

> That looks like an ad from 'Unix World', the kind you'd see in the early
> 1980s when
> everybody & their brother was introducing MC68000 based superminin's that
> were
> going to eat DECs lunch. Companies had red/white/blue names like Victory,
> Eagle,
> Fortune (a bone white desktop system, Unix-on-a-floppy). Zilog had been
> bought
> by Chevron/Exxon (or whatever they called themselves then) who were going
> to get
> into high-tech in a big way and they were pushing the Z8000 but the
> venture capital
> money was going with Motorola.
>

Please do *not* top post... it is very bad form in Usenet.

[Ahem A Rivet's Shot]

You met bad ones then, you needed to derate them for developers, a
"twenty user" machine was good for three maybe four developers - let's
quietly ignore the Idris box I met that had no hardware memory protection,
that was dodgy for one C developer.

[dsgrace]

"Charles Richmond" <net...@aquaporin4.com> wrote
> "dsgrace" <x...@x.net> wrote
>> "Charles Richmond" <net...@aquaporin4.com> wrote

>>> Has anyone here heard of or used a Harris HCX machine??? I could find
>>> precious little on the internet about these machines.

>> That looks like an ad from 'Unix World', the kind you'd see in the early
>> 1980s when

> Please do *not* top post... it is very bad form in Usenet.
>

Jeeze, here it is the second decade into the 21st century and some idiot has
to be reminded not to top post . . .

Oh wait, that idiot who needed the reminding was me!

[Tim McCaffrey]

In article <jkhtum$4do$1...@dont-email.me>, net...@aquaporin4.com says...

>
>Has anyone here heard of or used a Harris HCX machine??? I could find
>precious little on the internet about these machines. These computers were
>designed from the ground up to run a version of Unix. ISTM that Harris
>bought out the original company that developed the machines. At a PPoE back
>in the 1980's, I had an opportunity to use an HCX-5 for a while.
>
>I found an ad for a Harris HCX-5 in the new products section of a magazine
>(actually an Acrobat .pdf file of that section). I put the ad for the
>Harris HCX-5 on a web page. Take a look and see if you recognize the
>machine:
>
>http://www.aquaporin4.com/hcx5/
>

I found this excerpt about the 4.3 BSD release:

"The primary purpose of this release is to provide sup-
port for the ``tahoe'' processor, the CPU used by Computer
Consoles, Inc. (CCI Power 6/32, 6/32SX), and high end lines
of Harris (HCX-7 and HCX-9), Unisys (7000/40), and ICL (Clan
7). Support for this processor is derived from the 4.2BSD
system done by CCI. Support for new DEC equipment has also
been added, including support for the 8250 BI-based CPU and
the KDB-50 BI disk controller from Chris Torek, and the QVSS
and QDSS display drivers for the MicroVAX II, contributed by
Digital Equipment Corporation. We expect to provide support
for both the VAX and the tahoe processors in future
releases. "

[Tim McCaffrey]

In article <jl4hol$vi7$1...@USTR-NEWS.TR.UNISYS.COM>, timca...@aol.com says...

Also from the same page:

Tahoe follows up on 4.3 BSD in 1988 with plans to ditch the aging (ironically
it would be around for 12 more years...) VAX platform with machine
independence and a port to the "Tahoe" Power 6/32 platform. No one has any
idea what this Tahoe computer is, as it completely disappeared off the face of
the planet shortly after. However by introducing the Tahoe port, it helped
seperate out the VAX specific code, there by allowing 4.3 BSD to become a more
portable operating system.

The original announcement is here
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.tahoe/browse_thread/thread/e7431a9ef74
cd7eb#


About the Power 6/32:

Power 6/32
From Computer History Wiki
Jump to: navigation, search
The Tahoe was the code name for the Power 6/32 from Computer Consoles
Incorporated that the CSRG had ported 4.3 BSD to in the 4.3 BSD Tahoe
releaase.

Although the Tahoe did help seperate out a lot of VAX specific code from the
base, allowing BSD to become more portable, the Power 6/32 machine quickly
disappeared off the market, and not much is known about them.

All that I can find out about them is this table from
http://www.dunnington.u-net.com/public/dhrystone.c

*----------------DHRYSTONE VERSION 1.0 RESULTS BEGIN--------------------
*
* MACHINE MICROPROCESSOR OPERATING COMPILER DHRYSTONES/SEC.
* TYPE SYSTEM NO REG REGS
* -------------------------- ------------ --------- ---------------
* CCI POWER 6/32 COS(SV+4.2) cc 7500 7800
* CCI POWER 6/32 POWER 6 UNIX/V cc 8236 8498
* CCI POWER 6/32 4.2 Rel. 1.2b cc 8963 9544
* VAX 11/780 - UNIX 5.2 cc 1515 1562
* VAX 11/780 - UNIX 4.3bsd cc 1646 1662
Which may give some indication on the initial reasons why the Power 6/32 was
chosen as the sucessor to the VAX by CSRG.


>

[Tim McCaffrey]

soles, Inc. (CCI Power 6/32, 6/32SX), and high end lines
>of Harris (HCX-7 and HCX-9), Unisys (7000/40), and ICL (Clan
>7). Support for this processor is derived from the 4.2BSD
>system done by CCI. Support for new DEC equipment has also
>been added, including support for the 8250 BI-based CPU and
>the KDB-50 BI disk controller from Chris Torek, and the QVSS
>and QDSS display drivers for the MicroVAX II, contributed by
>Digital Equipment Corporation. We expect to provide support
>for both the VAX and the tahoe processors in future
>releases. "
>
>
>

BTW, I'm not posting the URL I got these pages from because they have been
hacked and it keeps redirecting me to virus sites.

However, a press release:

http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1985-06-04/business/8501220335_1_computer-sy
stems-division-harris-corp-minicomputer

There was also a comp.sys.tahoe at one point, which included discussions
about CCI 6/32, Harris HCX/7, & Sperry 7000 computers.

- Tim