Tektronix 4404 (Pegasus) correct information
Brock
concerning the Tek 4404 Artificial Intelligence System on the net,
the time has come to set the record straight.
The Tektronix 4404 is a personal, desktop computer system oriented towards
the development and delivery of AI oriented applications. It is a fully
supported Tek product, backed by the Tektronix sales and service
organization. The basic system is priced at $14,950.
The basic 4404 hardware includes:
10mhz (no wait states) 68010 processor
1 megabyte of RAM
Virtual memory support hardware (max 8MB per process)
Floating-point co-processor (National 32081)
Monochrome bitmap display (1024x1024 "virtual display" over which
a 640x480 viewport may be smoothly panned using the mouse.)
The 128k frame buffer is directly addressable and is
independent of the 1MB system RAM.
The above mentioned mouse (3 button)
40 megabyte hard-disk (a recent change, it was originally
announced with 20 MB)
A 327KB (formatted) 5-1/4 inch floppy.
RS-232, Centronics printer interface, keyboard, clock, sound, etc.
Standard software includes:
The Smalltalk-80 System. This is the full Smalltalk-80 system as
developed at Xerox PARC with many enhancements and fixes
by Tektronix. It is implemented via Tek's proprietary
Smalltalk-80 language interpreter. Benchmarks
indicate that the performance of this implementation is
approximately 2.5 times faster than the standard implementation
on the Xerox 1100 (Dolphin).
The 4404 OS. This is a single user, multi-tasking OS with virtual
memory support. The OS might be most accurately described
as a "Unix act-a-like" i.e. it has a process model, file system,
system calls, etc. which are generally equivalent to their
corresponding Unix features. It is, however, not AT&T Unix.
It is implemented in assembly language and is highly optimized
for the 68000 family. The OS overhead, excluding network
support, but including everything else in the kernel
(buffers, VM support, etc.) is about 100K bytes. In addition
it is FAST!
System 5 compatible C compiler and library. As well as an assembler,
linker, and debugger.
ANSI 3.64 (i.e. VT-100) terminal emulator. This means both that a
program running locally may view the keyboard and display as
a ANSI standard terminal and that the entire system may be
used as an ANSI terminal to a remote host.
Options include:
A 1 MB memory expansion board.
Franz Lisp.
Prolog.
Emacs.
Ethernet interface and support for TCP/IP protocols.
Additional mass storage.
For further information including complete pricing information please contact
your nearest Tek sales office. (There is probably one in your area).
Or look in the next Tektronix catalog. Please note that your local Tek
sales engineer is the only official and reliable source of information
concerning Tek products.
Thanks for all the interest,
Allen Wirfs-Brock
Software Project Leader, Tek 4404
Computer Research Lab. and AI Machine program
P.O. Box 500 MS 50-662
Tektronix Inc.
Beaverton, Oregon 97077
tektronix!tekchips!allenw
Unix is a trademark of AT&T, Smalltalk-80 is a trademark of Xerox,
Tek and Tektronix are trademarks of Tektronix, Inc.