Apple IIGS being discontinued Dec 1992
KCR...@psuvm.psu.edu
from Apple Dealer Price lists. The Apple IIe will remain in production
believe it or not.
Ken
Michael Rogero Brown
that the IIe is still being made.
Sorta reminds me of when Coleco stopped making the Adam and all my CS friends
were amazed that it was still being made.
Atari stopped making the 8-bit a coupla years back.
I don't remember when Tandy/Radio Shack stopped making the Color Computer or
the TRS-80 line.
Does Commodore still make any 8-biters (C64/128) ???
--
<< Michael Rogero Brown | Disclaimer: I speak >>
<< CS Graduate Student-Florida Atlantic Univ | only for myself. >>
<< Internet: mich...@sol.cse.fau.edu | All my opinions are >>
<< BitNet: m_brown@fauvax | that: mine & opinions. >>
mcc...@regent.enet.dec.com
[Note: I have cross posted to comp.arch to try and generate some hard core
computer arch discussion, but some readers may not appreciate this thread,
so unless your reply is appropriate for comp.arch, post only to folklore....]
What is so great about the PDP 10? It seems most hackers who have used them
would kill to get one...why? What made them so...cool?...great?...gods gift to
hackers? Was it architecture? performance? cost? implementation? 36 bit
words?...
Be specific, why was it a great machine (or why not...)
A more important question may be, what made the PDP 10's operating systems
(TOPS-10/20, ITS,...) so wonderful? Why do people claim that U*IX, VMS, [and
DOS :-)] are a step backwards?
Although it may sound like I am PDP-10 hostile, I am not, I just want sound
reasons to support all the claims I have heard (so when I design my own
system....)
PS: Please don't direct me to alt.sys.pdp8, as we don't have it here yet
(strange eh?)
PPS: I don't want to know why/how the PDP 10 died/was killed, there has been
enough on that recently.
John W.F. McClain
Disclaimer: I don't speak for DEC and I have never used a PDP-10 (do like
PDP-8s though....)
Garrett Wollman
>
>Does Commodore still make any 8-biters (C64/128) ???
>
I think it would take (me, anyway) a lot more than eight bites to get
through a C64...
-GAWollman
--
Garrett A. Wollman | Shashish is simple, it's discreet, it's brief. ...
wol...@emba.uvm.edu | Shashish is the bonding of hearts in spite of distance.
uvm-gen!wollman | It is a bond more powerful than absence. We like people
UVM disagrees. | who like Shashish. - Claude McKenzie + Florent Vollant
Kimo B. Yap
...
>What is so great about the PDP 10? It seems most hackers who have used them
>would kill to get one...why? What made them so...cool?...great?...gods gift to
>hackers? Was it architecture? performance? cost? implementation? 36 bit
>words?...
>Be specific, why was it a great machine (or why not...)
>A more important question may be, what made the PDP 10's operating systems
>(TOPS-10/20, ITS,...) so wonderful? Why do people claim that U*IX, VMS, [and
>DOS :-)] are a step backwards?
As a former TOPS-10 developer (one of the last) I'll speak for that side and
let the -20 people speak for themselves, although some of what I say applies
to the -20 as well.
I think the thing that most made the -10 such a cult is that it was easy to
play around ('hack') and do something constructive. Some of this is due to
the fact that the -10 and -20 existed before security became as much an issue
as it is now (although Un*x would also fit in this category), but some was
just due to the way things were developed.
Perhaps one of the central things to this was DDT, the debugger. Much more
powerful than ODT or anything since, although it was not source level. You
could use DDT.EXE (.SAV in the old days) as a program to write anything from
a one-instruction program to reasonably complicated programs, using it either
interpretively (instruction<ESC>X executes the instruction) or writing it into
the patch area. This means you didn't have to go through a bunch of syntax
just to get something to compile and load. Quite useful if you, say, just want
to know what kind of results a particular system service (UUO) gives you or
exactly what the parameters are (and you can't figure out or don't have the
doc). DDT was also the same as the executable file patcher and the system
debugger. Since it was assembled from the same source, there was a unity of
syntax. Oh, and it was also your object file debugger.
Along the same lines, you didn't have to get everything perfect to
be able to debug a program. You could have a program with, say, undefined
symbols and still debug it. VMS (at least as I last used it) won't let you
link a .OBJ with errors (as opposed to warnings). Great for incrementally
developing programs.
On large-system lines, TOPS-10 always 'thought big'. It wasn't
crippled by FILES-11 (where you have to figure out how many files you're
going to allow on the volume when you initialize it). Accounting and control
information was readily available to write programs so that you could
do accounting whatever way you wanted (in the end, for example, you could
include or exclude monitor overhead time in what you charged a user for).
The schedular on T-10 was more realistic about what people wanted to see.
Little things like the control-T status line which told you really useful
things (like the reason your program wasn't running was because it was waiting
for terminal input and you missed the prompt), or, if it was running, just
how fast it was running.
I'll think of more later.-kby
Kimo B. Yap
Mark 'Mark' Sachs
(Michael Rogero Brown) says:
>Sorta reminds me of when Coleco stopped making the Adam and all my CS friends
>were amazed that it was still being made.
>Does Commodore still make any 8-biters (C64/128) ???
They're still churning 'em out. The C64 is selling quite well in Eastern
Europe actually; on the order of hundreds of thousands of units per year.
I'm not really sure what to make of this :-) The C128 was discontinued
a while ago, though.
"Thank you, Dr. Science."
[Your blood pressure just went up.] Mark Sachs IS: mbs...@psuvm.psu.edu
DISCLAIMER: If PSU knew I had opinions they'd probably try to charge me for it.
Adam Justin Thornton
>I don't know whether I should be amazed that the IIGS was still being made or
>that the IIe is still being made.
I'm not. The //e is a lovely machine. Just beautiful. I could kiss it.
>Does Commodore still make any 8-biters (C64/128) ???
They sell about 700,000 64's a year. They seemed to be quite the rage in
Poznan, Poland last summer.
Adam
--
"And in the heartbreak years that lie ahead, |++| ad...@rice.edu |++| Cthulhu
Be true to yourself and the Grateful Dead." --Joan Baez | 64,928 | fthagn!
"Very often, a common stone, thrown away and despised, is worth more than
a cow." -- Paracelsus | If these were Rice's opinions I'd shoot myself.
Don Stokes
> Along the same lines, you didn't have to get everything perfect to
> be able to debug a program. You could have a program with, say, undefined
> symbols and still debug it. VMS (at least as I last used it) won't let you
> link a .OBJ with errors (as opposed to warnings). Great for incrementally
> developing programs.
That's a function of the compilers -- they tend to take the object file
away from you.
Undefined externals aren't a problem -- the linker will complain bitterly
about them but still produce an executable with 0 in each of the undefined
references. The executable will run, but if you hit one of the references
you'll go piling into the protected zero page and ACCVIO real fast.
Of course one trick is to be compiling kernel mode stuff, leave out a
module, run it by mistake (because the RUN command was in the typeahead;
it was *going* to work, after all 8-) and watch the crash dump get
written.... (privileged users only, obviously.)
--
Don Stokes, ZL2TNM (DS555) d...@zl2tnm.gen.nz (home)
Network Manager, Computing Services Centre d...@vuw.ac.nz (work)
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand +64-4-495-5052
Bill Parke
It was still the best ever architecture to write assembler for.
Plus if you really wanted a tight loop to wail on the KA-10 or KI-10 you
would just put the loop into the registers. (Not so much true onthe KL-10
as the Cache was as fast as or faster then register access)
--
Bill Parke parke%star.e...@decwrl.dec.com
VMS Development decwrl!star.enet.dec.com!parke
Digital Equipment Corp pa...@star.enet.dec.com
110 Spit Brook Road ZK01-2/D59, Nashua NH 03063
The views expressed are my own.
Ryan A Moore
>I don't know whether I should be amazed that the IIGS was still being made or
>that the IIe is still being made.
Why?? As the proud owner of an Apple IIgs I can tell you that there is nothing
particularly out-of-date about the GS!!! The operating system is quite nice...
loosely based on the ideals of the Mac... but with some VERY nice extra
features like the concept of FST (file system translators) that allow foreign
disk formats to be mounted on the system transparently. The ONLY other system
I have seen that works in the same fashion is the NeXT.
Also, maybe the original hardware on the GS mayy be a little out-dated, but it
can easily be upgraded. With the newest accelerator cards, the GS can support
a full-color GUI that is almost identical to the Macs a LOT faster than most of
the colors Macs currently on the market. There are even programs that allow
the GS to use "TrueType" fonts that are totally scaleable. We can take a Mac
disk with TT fonts on them, shove it in the GS, and copy them to our hard drive
and use them directly... no mess no fuss...
It's too bad that Apple doesn't recognize the still-capable power off the GS.
GS' provide a little less power than a Mac for a LOT less money. It's the
perfect solution for schools who don't need a lot of computing power and who
don't have a lot of money... and that goes for mainstream "novice" computer
users too...
The GS is a little known gem that has provided a lot of power for the buck...
you haven't seen anything until you've seen a GS running GNO/ME, a multitasking
environment that turn the GS into a little UNIX-like box!!!!
Words from a true GS lover...
Ryan Moore
P.S. I'm even currently typing this on my GS while logged into our school's
VAX!!!!
Michael Rogero Brown
>In article <1992Dec9.0...@cybernet.cse.fau.edu>, mich...@cse.fau.edu (Michael Rogero Brown) writes:
>>I don't know whether I should be amazed that the IIGS was still being made or
>>that the IIe is still being made.
>
>Why?? As the proud owner of an Apple IIgs I can tell you that there is nothing
>particularly out-of-date about the GS!!! The operating system is quite nice...
>loosely based on the ideals of the Mac...
You missunderstood. I don;t think the IIgs is out of date. It's just that
Apple for the last couple of years seems to do nothing but Mac stuff. I had
assumed that the II line was dead. Especially when they came out with that
II-emulator card for the LC.
>It's too bad that Apple doesn't recognize the still-capable power off the GS.
>GS' provide a little less power than a Mac for a LOT less money. It's the
>perfect solution for schools who don't need a lot of computing power and who
>don't have a lot of money... and that goes for mainstream "novice" computer
>users too...
>
Yeah. If schools have to get some inexpensive computer, I'd rather it be the
IIgs then the older II (or PC-clone). I was never impressed by the original
II
>The GS is a little known gem that has provided a lot of power for the buck...
>you haven't seen anything until you've seen a GS running GNO/ME, a multitasking
>environment that turn the GS into a little UNIX-like box!!!!
>
Chon David Torres
>In article <1992Dec9.0...@cybernet.cse.fau.edu>, mich...@cse.fau.edu (Michael Rogero Brown) writes:
>>I don't know whether I should be amazed that the IIGS was still being made or
>>that the IIe is still being made.
>Words from a true GS lover...
> Ryan Moore
>P.S. I'm even currently typing this on my GS while logged into our school's
>VAX!!!!
A GS VAX combination .... need i say more :-)
-chon
--
"In order to know the material of which an idea is made, one needs only to let
fall upon it a drop of strong acid." - Eugene Zamiatin
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
cto...@cco.caltech.edu cto...@juliet.caltech.edu
Nolan Hinshaw
|>Does Commodore still make any 8-biters (C64/128) ???
It'd take more than a lousy 6502 to bite a typical '8, something like a '12 or
better, especially a '12 with FPP, a RF08, and DECtapes.
--
Nolan "Still has a LAP/6 DIAL/MS manual" Hinshaw
Charles Lasner
>
>It was still the best ever architecture to write assembler for.
A basic concept is being expressed here:
The PDP-10 is the best ever *machine* to do something for. Most of today's
people are attempting to make an argument about the fact that (likely some
variant of unix) some software system is the one they most like to write code
on.
Besides the argument about assembly language versus high-level abstracted
languages, something else has been lost: the *identity* of the underlying
machine. Perhaps some machine will come along that will be "worthy" of
being compared to a PDP-10 in some ways, but we'll never know it, because
it will be merely considered by most people as to whether or not it seems
to be a somewhat better or somewhat worse (or faster or slower, or other
less than subtle yardstick) "platform" to be become to what extent their
favorite (or not) place to run **ix on.
PDP-10's could run unix. Virtually all of the people who like the machine
wouldn't want to.
cjl
Jimmy Malcolm Pierce
>>I don't know whether I should be amazed that the IIGS was still being made or
>>that the IIe is still being made.
>
>Why?? As the proud owner of an Apple IIgs I can tell you that there is
> nothing particularly out-of-date about the GS!!! The operating system
>is quite nice...
Many Elementary schools in the Southern US have computer educational
programs, and they all run on the Apple ][+ and ][e. So, there is a sound
reason for keeping the Apple ][ family of computers going; money...
DJ.
--
Jim Pierce Bach. of Sci. in Applied Computer Science USM - Gulf Park Campus
jmpi...@whale.st.usm.edu Disclaimer: Standard.
Charles Lasner
There is *nothing* like MAGSPY.
har...@indyvax.iupui.edu
> mcc...@regent.enet.dec.com () writes:
> ...
>>What is so great about the PDP 10? It seems most hackers who have used them
>>would kill to get one...why? What made them so...cool?...great?...gods gift to
>>hackers? Was it architecture? performance? cost? implementation? 36 bit
>>words?...
>
> Perhaps one of the central things to this was DDT, the debugger. Much more
> powerful than ODT or anything since, although it was not source level. You
> could use DDT.EXE (.SAV in the old days) as a program to write anything from
> a one-instruction program to reasonably complicated programs, using it either
> interpretively (instruction<ESC>X executes the instruction) or writing it into
> the patch area. This means you didn't have to go through a bunch of syntax
> just to get something to compile and load. Quite useful if you, say, just want
> to know what kind of results a particular system service (UUO) gives you or
> exactly what the parameters are (and you can't figure out or don't have the
> doc). DDT was also the same as the executable file patcher and the system
> debugger. Since it was assembled from the same source, there was a unity of
> syntax. Oh, and it was also your object file debugger.
Nothing like installing a hot patch in running monitor. Or figuring out how
to install a patch that wasn't meant to be installed as a hot patch in the
running monitor in such an order for each piece so the system wouldn't go BOOM
while you were patching it.
Sort of like an expert Edsel mechanic looking back on his days of glory now
though...
--
James Harvey IUPUI OIT Technical Support/Networks
har...@iupui.edu har...@indiana.edu uucp:iugate!harvey bitnet:harvey@indyvax
Rick Kelly
In some ways this doesn't surprise me. The IIe must cost them next to
nothing to make. I think they are built in Singapore. I would guess that
they still have a life as lab instrument controllers, and they can be
networked in the classroom. There are hundreds of addon cards for the IIe.
The IIGS, which has more expensive custom chips, has been left by the
wayside by developers.
--
Rick Kelly r...@rmkhome.UUCP unixland!rmkhome!rmk r...@frog.UUCP
Rick Kelly
>In article <92343.163...@psuvm.psu.edu> <KCR...@psuvm.psu.edu> writes:
>>I thought you all would like to know, the high end Apple II has been removed
>>from Apple Dealer Price lists. The Apple IIe will remain in production
>>believe it or not.
>>
>I don't know whether I should be amazed that the IIGS was still being made or
>that the IIe is still being made.
>
>Sorta reminds me of when Coleco stopped making the Adam and all my CS friends
>were amazed that it was still being made.
>
>Atari stopped making the 8-bit a coupla years back.
>
>I don't remember when Tandy/Radio Shack stopped making the Color Computer or
>the TRS-80 line.
>
>Does Commodore still make any 8-biters (C64/128) ???
Commodore still makes the C64, and sells them like hotcakes in Eastern
Europe.
The Apple IIe is unique in that it probably costs Apple pocket change to
build them, and they have all those slots.
Apple IIe processor cards:
8085
Z80
8088
68000
Uses:
Data acquisition
Stepper motor control
Security system control
Process control
Education
Anthony E. Siegman
>would kill to get one...why? What made them so...cool?...great?...
Well, from a purely amateur user's viewpoint (not a hacker or any
kind of "real programmer"), command and filename completion,
reasonably meaningful command names, and online help were all
wonderful...especially the first of these.
I still recall my disbelief, after being forced, kicking and
screaming, to move from Stanford's TOPS-20 systems to Unix systems
when the last DEC and Foonly machines were shut down, when I learned
that the allegedly much better Unix OS did NOT have command or
filename completion.
Edward S. Hirgelt
On Tue, 8 Dec 1992 23:22:20 GMT,
mcc...@regent.enet.dec.com () said:
John>> What is so great about the PDP 10? It seems most hackers who
John>> have used them would kill to get one...why? What made them
John>> so...cool?...great?...gods gift to hackers? Was it architecture?
John>> performance? cost? implementation? 36 bit words?...
Hmmm. Makes me think a lot about those days. There are several answers
from my standpoint. In no particular order...
1. I first came across PDP-10s after working on IBM 360 OS/MVT and with
TSO. Not exactly the worlds most interactive systems. I was very good
at them, but...
Seeing a true timesharing system that handled many users easily was
really eye opening.
2. TECO, its variants and eventually emacs.
3. A real macro assembler. The stuff IBM had at the time claimed to be a
macro assembler, but MACRO-10 was great fun and flexible. We were
writing very structured assembly language in my days at the old
CompuServ (before they became famous).
4. The architecture. Now how many different no-ops were there?
Seriously though.
+ General registers were locations 0 - 17 (octal) in memory.so any
memory reference instructionc also referenced the registers.
There was a ``neat hack'' in the KA-10 version of teco that I
dearly love. Since the -10 was a word addressable machine, byte
manipulations where a bit tricky. Teco kept a hole in the middle of
your buffer in memory where you were currently inserting text. When
this hole got full it needed to move a bunch of words to make room
for more text. It used a little loop of note more than 5 or 7
instructions to do this. But since the ACs (the registers) were
much faster than real memory, it loaded the sequence of
instructions into the ACs and did a JUMP 1 to transfer control to
the loop. The last instruction in the ACs did a JUMP xxx back to
the mainline code. Very cute.
+ Orthogonal instruction set. Any combination of things seemed to
work and work properly.
+ It was a very comfortable machine to program in assembly language.
+ Lots of software was available across the ARPA net for this beast.
John>> A more important question may be, what made the PDP 10's
John>> operating systems (TOPS-10/20, ITS,...) so wonderful? Why do
John>> people claim that U*IX, VMS, [and DOS :-)] are a step backwards?
I never really thought the OS was that great, in truth. It was the
obvious progenitor to VMS. Lots of stuff from TOPS-10 and -20 made it
into VMS (as did stuff from the -11 line)
Unix does a lot right. It is so easy to create subprocesses, do device
independent I/O, file redirection. Some of this was very tricky in
TOPS-10, others downright impossible.
+ File I/O is much cleaner in Unix than it was in TOPS-10. There was a
difference between devices so readang from a tty: was different than
from dsk:[1,2]foo.bar
+ The compile command was useful but make is definitely superior.
+ The command line interpreter was integral to the OS and could not be
replaced.
+ But many programming languages were supported. I used:
+ Algol
+ Simula
+ Macro-10
+ Bliss-10 (my favorite)
+ Bliss-36 (this too)
+ Fortran
+ Basic
+ MacLisp
+ Macsyma
at one time or another on DEC-10s.
+ DDT was really revolutionary. Break points, stepping through
instructions, examining memory. Very useful. I came from an
environment where post-mortem dump analysis was the most common way to
debug assembly language programs (ABEND).
+ And who can forget the great phone-book version of the manuals. I
foolishly pitched mine some time ago. Sigh.
Well, this ought to keep things going for a while.
Nostalgicly yours,
Ed
--
Ex vitio alterius |Ed Hirgelt |e...@tss.com
sapiens emendat suum. |Teknekron Software Systems, Inc|
(Publilius Syrus) |Palo Alto, Ca. |
Charles Lasner
>
>Sort of like an expert Edsel mechanic looking back on his days of glory now
>though...
Interesting metaphor:
The first-level reaction can be taken as offensive because the Edsel was looked
down in its day; the -10 was looked down upon by PDP-11 Marketing because it
was the only part of DEC they couldn't pull snow jobs on. When PDP-11
marketroids overquoted some overbloated -11 systems, LCG pulled rank and
insisted that they had the right to cancel any -11 system order priced over
$250,000, etc. In all probability the customer was being cheated, getting
mini-computer performance for a mainframe price.
But all other parts of DEC looked *up* to the -10, not down, so the analogy
to the lowly Edsel isn't deserved.
On second look, Edsels are now high-priced collector's items, demanding far
more today than they were ever sold for originally. Presumably an Edsel
mechanic is a well-respected craftsman, so perhaps this actually *is* a
complement.
cj "Is an EDSEL like an EDVAC?" l
Joseph H Allen
>What is so great about the PDP 10? It seems most hackers who have used them
>would kill to get one...why? What made them so...cool?...great?...gods gift to
>hackers?
I like them because they had such an anachronistic instruction set (for 1987
when I last hacked one). You had 36-bit words, half-word instructions,
variable byte lengths, addressable registers, skip instructions and
operating system errors indicated by skipping. It was so very bizarre but
also remarkably easy to program (the entire instruction set fit on two
pages). I wrote some games and did numeric analysis homework in macro.
>A more important question may be, what made the PDP 10's operating systems
>(TOPS-10/20, ITS,...) so wonderful?
I only semi-liked the operating system. It had cool features: ESC
completion, '?' help, magical make, automatic memory allocation, and
replaceable shell. But just about everything else about it sucked. UNIX is
much better.
One thing that really made the it likeable was the enthusiastic
documentation available for it. People would take the MACRO-20 programmer's
manual (written by someone from Stamford who's name escapes me) for months
past the return date. Those without this book had to suffer with the crummy
DEC documentation. If you want to see real enthusiasm for this machine,
look at any classic LISP text.
Also real emacs was neat. The TECO source for it looked like garbage.
--
/* jha...@world.std.com (192.74.137.5) */ /* Joseph H. Allen */
int a[1817];main(z,p,q,r){for(p=80;q+p-80;p-=2*a[p])for(z=9;z--;)q=3&(r=time(0)
+r*57)/7,q=q?q-1?q-2?1-p%79?-1:0:p%79-77?1:0:p<1659?79:0:p>158?-79:0,q?!a[p+q*2
]?a[p+=a[p+=q]=q]=q:0:0;for(;q++-1817;)printf(q%79?"%c":"%c\n"," #"[!a[q-1]]);}
John R. Grout
1982 (the last year at DEC working on TOPS-20), I have some opinions.
What was great about the PDP-10 architecture?
1. 36 bits... we're talking _usable_ single-precision floating point here.
2. The instruction set architecture was incredibly powerful for human
programmers... I've heard many people who think that it is the best ISA
they've ever programmed for... I sure do. The combination of powerful
comparisons, masking instructions, skips, jumps and mapping the accumulators
(_please_ don't call them registers) as relocated (or virtual) memory
locations 0-17 was unmatched... _no_ ISA I've seen since let you do more
things in just a few instructions. Also, before cache memory, tight loops
could be copied into the ACs and executed from there (they could afterwards
too, but it hurt instead of helping).
3. Both operating systems (TOPS-10 and TENEX/TOPS-20... I can't speak for
ITS) had very efficient (if baroque) timesharing (as I recall, TOPS-10 was
more efficient but TENEX/TOPS-20 had more function, such as "copy on write"
and multitasking).
Back as early as the late 1960's, long before virtual memory, the KA10 had
extensive provisions for sharing _one_ copy of reentrant code (loaded as the
"high" segment, starting at relocated location 400000) in memory among _all_
users. The first KA10 I used in the mid-1970's (when it was almost obsolete)
was about as powerful CPU-wise as a large Sun workstation (if that), yet it
would support thirty or forty users banging away at BASIC with only a few
antique 2314-clone (RP03?) disks. This late-1960's machine was this usable
even though it had refrigerator box sized 16K word _core_ banks and _no_
integrated circuits in the processor (only SSI in the memory controller)... it
was closer to an IBM 7094 (also 36 bits, by the way) than an IBM 360. Also
(for you architecture buffs), the KA10 was self-timed logic with only 50/60 Hz
power for an external clock. Unlike later PDP-10 processors (but like the
Cray Research Y-MP), the KA10 had to "shuffle" users around in memory to make
holes to put other users in... it did have relocation registers (so users
could move, unlike that silly "roll-in/roll-out" for IBM's MVT), but each of a
user's segments (one or two if using reentrant programming) had to be
contiguous in core.
What killed off the PDP-10 architecture?
1. 36 bits... not a power of 2! Seriously... the original addressing limit
of 2 ** 18 36-bit words was a hardship... though the DEC-10 extended this and
the DEC-20 could have. Multiprocessing wasn't implemented in TOPS-20 either.
Most important (IMHO) is #2.
2. The architecture was incredibly difficult to pipeline... mapping
accumulators as memory creates enormous potential structural and data hazards.
Also, I read an article once claiming that it was the hardest architecture for
a compiler to generate code for.
3. The focus of the operating systems was on timesharing... not batch, not
tapes, not data base, not client/server... just timesharing... as much or more
than ??ix.
Even though the PDP-10 architecture couldn't handle the age of RISC and
pipelining (it's full of "N-th implementation artifacts", for many different
N), I still miss it.
--
John R. Grout | INTERNET: j-g...@uiuc.edu
Frank - Hardware Hacker - Borger
>
>A basic concept is being expressed here:
>
>PDP-10's could run unix. Virtually all of the people who like the machine
>wouldn't want to.
The above 2 sentences describe the situation perfectly. If you don't
understand the statement, you probably deserve Unix.
Frank R. Borger - Physicist __ Internet: Fr...@rover.uchicago.edu
Michael Reese - Univ. of Chicago |___ Phone : 312-791-8075 fax : 567-7455
Center for Radiation Therapy | |_) _ Toots Shor's restaurant is so
| \|_) crowded nobody goes there any more.
"Birthplace of Softball" |_) Yogi Berra
Matthew Curtin
> In article <1g5hqm...@master.cs.rose-hulman.edu> moo...@HYDRA.ROSE-HULMAN
> >In article <1992Dec9.0...@cybernet.cse.fau.edu>, mich...@cse.fau.edu
> >>I don't know whether I should be amazed that the IIGS was still being made
> >>that the IIe is still being made.
> >
> >Why?? As the proud owner of an Apple IIgs I can tell you that there is
> > nothing particularly out-of-date about the GS!!! The operating system
> >is quite nice...
>
> Many Elementary schools in the Southern US have computer educational
> programs, and they all run on the Apple ][+ and ][e. So, there is a sound
> reason for keeping the Apple ][ family of computers going; money...
While that is true to an extent, it is pretty obvious that Macint, er,
Apple, Inc. would like to "move on" to the Macintosh and get the whole
world running on 030 or better Macs. If Apple really wanted to keep the II
around for money, they might actually spend a red cent on marketing the
machine. I find it amazing that the Apple II continues to exist even
though it has been years since Apple has done anything to promote the
machines.
Even authorized Apple dealers are a joke. If they even have a GS on
display, and it's turned on, its usually running some cheesey 8-bit
software from 1983. My local authorized Apple dealer told me that the GS
had been dropped in 1990. They told me that I couldn't get a video overlay
card, there was going to be no ethernet card made, etc, etc, etc...
The support that the users are able to give the machine is incredible.
I'm not worried that all of the thousands of dollars I have wrapped up in
my IIs has gone to waste, because of that support. New software is still
being developed, support is still being given by user groups, the net,
etc, new hardware is being developed. And even a new third-party CPU is
under development. When the Avatar GS clone arrives, I'll probably drop
the money right there to get it. I love my IIs, I doubt that I'll ever
give them up.I don't think it's all to do with the machine, it's the
spirit behind it, the spirit that created it, and that which keeps it
going. The spirit that Apple has forgotten all about.
While I think that technically the Macs are, for the most part, neat
machines, I don't think I'd ever get one for several reasons. a) they're
closed boxes. The Apple II was the original open system, and everything
that I've used and liked has been an "open system."
b) in 2002, will Mac users be squealing that Apple has dropped
them in favor of the PowerPC, having the PowerPC run a mediocre emulation
that covers "older" Mac stuff only?
c) "What do you get when you cross Apple and IBM? IBM." I HATE
IBM.
__________________________________________________________________________
| C. Matthew Curtin ! "But I am the enlightened one, they are |
| P.O. Box 27081 ! but mere sheep, following each other in |
| Columbus, OH 43227-0081 ! the name of compatibility." -B. Heineman |
| 614/365-3272 (voice mail) ! Apple II Forever! |
|_cmc...@bluemoon.use.com_____!_____________GNO_your_AppleIIGS!__________|
Jim Haynes
Here's my guess, and I've never even used a PDP10. It was a big machine
designed by people who had a lot of experience with using little machines;
and it was marketed by people that had a lot of experience selling to
education and research users who knew the product they were buying and
the problems they were trying to solve. In contrast the other big machines
of the day were designed by people who had a lot of experience with big
machines - they had a punched-card batch production mentality; and they
were marketed by people who had a lot of experience selling to Institutions
(such as corporations and banks) where the people who make the buying
decision are influenced as much by the kind of company they are buying
from as by their own needs.
So you had a very powerful machine that was as user-friendly (to the
techno-nerd sort of user) sitting at the Teletype as if it were a mini;
it was designed from the ground up for the interactive terminal user.
DEC could have advertised it as "not the kind of computer your banker
would buy" and the people who would buy it would understand perfectly.
--
hay...@cats.ucsc.edu
hay...@cats.bitnet
"Ya can argue all ya wanna, but it's dif'rent than it was!"
"No it aint! But ya gotta know the territory!"
Meredith Willson: "The Music Man"
Rodney Radford
>> programs, and they all run on the Apple ][+ and ][e. So, there is a sound
>> reason for keeping the Apple ][ family of computers going; money...
>While that is true to an extent, it is pretty obvious that Macint, er,
>Apple, Inc. would like to "move on" to the Macintosh and get the whole
>world running on 030 or better Macs. If Apple really wanted to keep the II
>around for money, they might actually spend a red cent on marketing the
>machine. I find it amazing that the Apple II continues to exist even
>though it has been years since Apple has done anything to promote the
>machines.
Another good reason to keep the Apple II series alive is due to all the
specialized software/hardware that is available for the handicapped. Recently
I have been involved with helping a local school for handicapped children
(the Tammy Lynn Center) to get a few Apple II systems set up for use in their
classes, and eventhough I am an avid Apple supporter, I tried to find some
other system for TLC to use. Since I saw the 'light at the end of the tunnel'
for the Apple II line (didn't everyone), I hated for them to put money in a
'dead' platform. However, we could not find any other system (including
Apple's Mac) that had the breadth of specialized hardware/software needed
for this specialized market.
There are several vendors that sell large membrane style keyboards, special
breath-activated input devices, speech synthesizers, touch sensitive screens,
etc, that work with the Apple II line. When I called Apple and spoke to
their DISABILIES group, they suggested that we purchase the MAC/LC so we can
take advantage of all the Apple II peripherals/software UNTIL THE EQUIVALENT
SOFTWARE/HARDWARE IS AVAILABLE ON THE MAC LINE...!
So, for the sake of the handicapped, I hate to see the Apple IIgs being
shelved (the IIe can't be far behind...). As a former Apple II developer
(spent several years developing a 100K+ UCSD Pascal program for the IIe),
I have some very fond moments sitting in front of an Apple IIe (usually in
the wee-hours of the morning). But enough nostalga...
PS: If anyone is looking to get rid of a IIe or IIgs and would like to donate
it to TLC, contact me. I'll pay for shipping, you will get a nice tax
break, and you will be helping a very worth cause! Thanx.
--
---
Rodney Radford || Computer Graphics/Imaging
sas...@unx.sas.com || SAS Institute, Inc.
(919) 677-8000 x7703 || Cary, NC 27513
Cheryl Lins
>While I think that technically the Macs are, for the most part, neat
>machines, I don't think I'd ever get one for several reasons. a) they're
>closed boxes. The Apple II was the original open system, and everything
>that I've used and liked has been an "open system."
Gee, Macs have had slots since, oh the Mac II in 1986. You can get a 'closed'
Mac if you don't need expansion, but you have many other choices.
> b) in 2002, will Mac users be squealing that Apple has dropped
>them in favor of the PowerPC, having the PowerPC run a mediocre emulation
>that covers "older" Mac stuff only?
Nope. Because PowerPC IS Macintosh.
> c) "What do you get when you cross Apple and IBM? IBM."
NOT
--
Cheryl Lins Oberon Paladin li...@apple.com | Real miracles, reasonable prices.
Kimo B. Yap
...
>3. A real macro assembler. The stuff IBM had at the time claimed to be a
> macro assembler, but MACRO-10 was great fun and flexible. We were
> writing very structured assembly language in my days at the old
> CompuServ (before they became famous).
Yeah, I always though MACRO-32 was a pain to use.
>4. The architecture. Now how many different no-ops were there?
...
> + Orthogonal instruction set. Any combination of things seemed to
> work and work properly.
> + It was a very comfortable machine to program in assembly language.
Which reminds me. I always thought the instruction set was a good basic set.
It was always fairly easy to do what you wanted to do, and the result was
usually fairly logical code (unless you deliberately did something for
speed or whatever; recall HACK.MEM). The example I remember most is LSH
(logical shift) LSH AC,positive shifts the AC to the left and LSH AC,negative
shifts to the right. You could compute how many bits you wanted to shift
and not care the sign of the result; the same instruction accomplishes
the "desired" result. On VAX, you need to do an EXTZV to go right and
an ASH to go left.
>I never really thought the OS was that great, in truth. It was the
>obvious progenitor to VMS. Lots of stuff from TOPS-10 and -20 made it
>into VMS (as did stuff from the -11 line)
...Not much of the good stuff.
>Unix does a lot right. It is so easy to create subprocesses, do device
>independent I/O, file redirection. Some of this was very tricky in
>TOPS-10, others downright impossible.
TOPS-20 was a lot cleaner in subprocesses. File redirection is much nicer
in Un*x (one of the few things I'll think is nicer), but the -10 was more
"independent" than VMS if you pull out of RMS. For example, a program
which specifically uses terminal-specific instructions works under batch.
>+ File I/O is much cleaner in Unix than it was in TOPS-10. There was a
> difference between devices so readang from a tty: was different than
> from dsk:[1,2]foo.bar
Only sort of true: you can read from tty: similar to dsk:foo.bar[1,2] but
not the reverse. If you treated everything as file-structured, things
worked right. If you made assumptions about not being file-structured (which
was true in most cases since people were lazy (myself included)), it wasn't
>+ The command line interpreter was integral to the OS and could not be
> replaced.
But it did make things easier for the system mugger ("my delete command
doesn't work..."). We did allow foreign commands later, and that does
allow good abbreviations, which doesn't work as well in systems
that'll run anything there's a file for around (although the -20 did
that better as well).
And, speaking of DDT, I remember that I liked having the monitor rather
than the linker usually write the .EXE file. Two examples of where this
was useful follow. One was an encryption module for .EXEs which could use
the linker's expertise at relocating code, but then run briefly to encrypt
the linked-in program and save. In the VMS case, it's difficult to figure
where to put the self-decrpytion code since you can't easily figure out where
any given random program doesn't have address space (I cheated and used
page 0 when I did this). A second was a diagnostic patch wherein I generated
an undefined symbol list which I followed in DDT so I could patch in something
to track references to the locations involved (I can't remember why, but
address break would work there, probably because it was a range of addresses
or something like that and we didn't have the Jupiter, obviously).
Oh well, enough for now.-kby
Dave Brown
>Also real emacs was neat. The TECO source for it looked like garbage.
Especially considering that TECO looks like
!START!J0AUA!CONT!L0AUBQA-QB"GXAK-LGA1UZ'QBUALZ-."G-L@O/CONT/'QZ"G0UZ@O/START/'
(Ten cool points to whoever figures out what that code does.
Twenty to whoever knows where I found it :-) )
Dave "Budding TECO hacker" Brown
--
Dave Brown
dagb...@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca
Phone: (519) 438-0530
"What God want, God gets. God help us all." --Roger Waters
Kimo B. Yap
Who needs command recognition with two-character command names:-)?-kby
David Fetrow
>
>What killed off the PDP-10 architecture?
>
>tapes, not data base, not client/server... just timesharing... as much or more
>than ??ix.
>
Actually, TOPS-10 has a wonderous tape management system. It sure beats
"dd" :-). It also has a rather nifty database available (1022) that is
very pleasant, that was a third party product.
Also remember that, before networks were common, the only way to co-operate
on computers in a modern manner was to share a machine, so concentrating
on timesharing wasn't necessarily a bad idea. If you had people all over the
place who had to share in realtime nice big PDP-10(s) were a very good choice.
In fact that's pretty much how Compuserve operates to this day.
--
-dave fetrow- INTERNET: fet...@biostat.washington.edu
BITNET: fetrow@uwalocke
Donald Lewine
| computer arch discussion, but some readers may not appreciate this thread,
| so unless your reply is appropriate for comp.arch, post only to folklore....]
As someone who spend over a decade an a noticable percentage of my life hacking
PDP-10s, I feel compelled to respond. I will restrict my reply to the architecture
of the machine and avoid the folklore.
|
| What is so great about the PDP 10? It seems most hackers who have used them
| hackers? Was it architecture? performance? cost? implementation? 36 bit
| words?...
The PDP-10 was in many ways a RISC machine. It had one format for all user instructions:
< 9 bits> < 4 >1 < 4> < 18 bits >
+---------+----+-+----+------------------+
| Op code | reg|@| Xr | Displacement |
+---------+----+-+----+------------------+
At a time when most real programmers used assembly language, the PDP-10 instruction
set was a joy to program. It is still the cleanest architecture I know.
The address space was 256K words or over a megabyte (Huge for the 1970s). Every
instruction could directly address any location in memory. Every instruction evaluated
its effective address before looking at the opcode.
The PDP-10 was invented at a time when it was not clear if the 6-bit code used by IBM
in the 7090 and 7094 would be replace by 7-bit ASCII or maybe 8-bit EBCDIC. The PDP-10
included the ability to easily process strings of bytes with an arbitrary byte size.
This abily may sound silly in 1992, when everyone knows that a character is 8-bits,
however, it was very useful in the 1970s when 7 and 9 track tapes came in all sorts
of formats.
PDP-10 COBOL also supported 6-bit characters in data files. For applications with a
large data base (tens of megabytes), that saved hundreds of thousands of dollars over
IBM 360s.
I have been an assembly language programmer for 32 years. I have programmed everything
from 7090s and 1401s to the latest RISCs. I have not found a machine that is as easy
to program at the assembly langauge level as the PDP-10. [[The 1401 comes close but
the address space is limited to 16000 characters. Yes, 16000 not 16384 because the
1401 was a decimal machine.]]
When the 18-bit address space became a problem, the architecture was messed up in
various ways. It was still one of the cleanest extended addressing scheme ever
invented. The loss of the ability to pack two pointers into a register or a word
is memory was a big loss. LISP people loved the PDP-10 because it was just so
natural to build linked lists as:
+------------------+--------------------+
| Back pointer | Forward Pointer |
+------------------+--------------------+
| A more important question may be, what made the PDP 10's operating systems
| (TOPS-10/20, ITS,...) so wonderful? Why do people claim that U*IX, VMS, [and
| DOS :-)] are a step backwards?
PDP-10s were designed to be BIG machines which competed with mainframes but were
engineered for real people to use them. TOPS-20 was designed with virtual memory
as a key component of the operating system from day 1.
While PDP-10 had a small amount of main memory and disk by today's standards (for
example, the "terminal" I am using at the moment has 32 Mb of memory and 400 Mb
of disk and most of the work is done by a server someplace else in the network) PDP-10
were huge for their day. Things like on-line help files, command recognition, and so
on were possible. A great deal of the machines resources were spent on the user
interface.
UN*X and other PDP-11 operating systems were designed to fit into much smaller machines.
DOS was designed to work in a very constrained environment. There are practical and
business reasons why one wants to be compatible with existing practice and the
installed base. Compatibility comes at a cost.
Most of the great leaps forward in computing were compatible with nothing and
broke new ground. For example, the Macintosh. The PDP-10 (the PDP-6 really) was
a great leap forward 20 years before the Mac.
|
| Disclaimer: I don't speak for DEC and I have never used a PDP-10 (do like
| PDP-8s though....)
Well, you have to use a PDP-10 to love one. And unless you are the type of person
who would love to drive around town in a red 1968 Firebird or GTO, you probably had
to use one when they were the new machine on the block.
--
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Donald A. Lewine (508) 870-9008 Voice
Data General Corporation (508) 366-0750 FAX
4400 Computer Drive. MS D112A
Westboro, MA 01580 U.S.A.
Sarr J. Blumson
>In article <1992Dec10.1...@csrd.uiuc.edu> j-g...@uiuc.edu writes:
>>
>>What killed off the PDP-10 architecture?
>>
Since nobody else has said this I will and will endure the flanes. In
the early 80s DEC had 3 choices:
1) kill the 10/20
2) kill the VAX
3) Continue to develop and market both, acknowledging that they were
competing for exactly the same customers; that every sale of one was a
lost sale for the other.
Which would you choose? Which would you choose if you were a
stockholder?
(Sarr Blumson)
CP/M lives!
> It was always fairly easy to do what you wanted to do, and the result was
> usually fairly logical code (unless you deliberately did something for
> speed or whatever; recall HACK.MEM). The example I remember most is LSH
> (logical shift) LSH AC,positive shifts the AC to the left and LSH AC,negative
> shifts to the right. You could compute how many bits you wanted to shift
> and not care the sign of the result; the same instruction accomplishes
> the "desired" result. On VAX, you need to do an EXTZV to go right and
> an ASH to go left.
Not true. ASH with a negative shift count will go right. I do it all the time.
--
Roger Ivie "My God! That computer is full of Pentium!
iv...@cc.usu.edu It's a wonder that you haven't been turned
into mutants!"
Hans Mulder
>In article <gFqkVB...@bluemoon.use.com> cmcu...@bluemoon.use.com (Matthew Curtin) writes:
>>While I think that technically the Macs are, for the most part, neat
>>machines, I don't think I'd ever get one for several reasons. a) they're
>>closed boxes. The Apple II was the original open system, and everything
>>that I've used and liked has been an "open system."
>Gee, Macs have had slots since, oh the Mac II in 1986. You can get a 'closed'
>Mac if you don't need expansion, but you have many other choices.
Gee, the Apple ][ had slots from day 1, the Mac got them *years* later.
You can open an Apple ][ with your bare hands. To open an early Mac (any
model before the Mac SE), you need a special screwdriver that's hard to
obtain and the screws are carefully hidden.
With your Apple ][ you got the schematics, and a commented assembly
listing of the monitor. When the Mac appeared, no documentation of MacOS
was available. Initially, software development on a Mac was impossible, as
there were no tools. No compilers, no assemblers, no debuggers, no nothing.
(Apple used a cross-development kit running on a Lisa).
Wonder why the Mac had such a hard time competing against the ][ ?
>Cheryl Lins Oberon Paladin li...@apple.com | Real miracles, reasonable prices.
^^^^^
Ah, that explains a lot. ^^^^^
--
Hans Mulder ha...@cs.kun.nl
Kimo B. Yap
>--
Yes, it goes right, but it doesn't do a LSH (it shifts the sign bit in).-kby
Rick Kelly
>In article <gFqkVB...@bluemoon.use.com> cmcu...@bluemoon.use.com (Matthew Curtin) writes:
>>While I think that technically the Macs are, for the most part, neat
>>machines, I don't think I'd ever get one for several reasons. a) they're
>>closed boxes. The Apple II was the original open system, and everything
>>that I've used and liked has been an "open system."
>
>Gee, Macs have had slots since, oh the Mac II in 1986. You can get a 'closed'
>Mac if you don't need expansion, but you have many other choices.
The simple, little Apple IIe, a general purpose computer with a lot of slots,
has many good things going for it. There are thousands of specialized boards
available for it that help automate jobs in the laboratory, the classroom,
and in industry. It is easy to write control programs from Applesoft BASIC,
a language known by many non-computer industry professionals.
The Macintosh has little of this hardware available, and requires the casual
programmer to climb a steep learning curve before they can produce anything
meaningful. It is a canned application machine.
The Apple IIe is a programmable tool that can do an amazing number of things,
considering it's age.
>> b) in 2002, will Mac users be squealing that Apple has dropped
>>them in favor of the PowerPC, having the PowerPC run a mediocre emulation
>>that covers "older" Mac stuff only?
>
>Nope. Because PowerPC IS Macintosh.
PowerPC is UNIX with a Mac emulation on top.
Taligent is not compatible with MacOS.
>> c) "What do you get when you cross Apple and IBM? IBM."
>
>NOT
That remains to be seen.
Charles Lasner
>In article <1992Dec11.0...@u.washington.edu> fet...@pike.u.washington.edu (David Fetrow) writes:
>>In article <1992Dec10.1...@csrd.uiuc.edu> j-g...@uiuc.edu writes:
>>>
>>>What killed off the PDP-10 architecture?
>>>
>
>Since nobody else has said this I will and will endure the flanes. In
>the early 80s DEC had 3 choices:
>
>1) kill the 10/20
>
>2) kill the VAX
>
>3) Continue to develop and market both, acknowledging that they were
>competing for exactly the same customers; that every sale of one was a
>lost sale for the other.
But this is the problem of "all your eggs in one basket" since there were plans
to make the TT-10 and the Jupiter, and all in-between. Moreover, the plan
to make the VAX largely turns its back on a sizeable software investment in
the -10/20 stuff. So, what do you tell the stockholders:
We want to market this new machine that largely overlaps our existing product.
Moreover, we'll have to write new software mostly from the ground up, yet
this software will not be distinctively different from where we are today with
the existing software for the existing machine. And as the design for both
the existing machine and the new design migrate upward and downware, they
will both find applications in the same market and will likely be a duplication
of effort, redundant products, etc.
In fact what DEC always does, is not tell the tale in the simplistic way
you presented the choices. They simply lied about how much better the VAX
would be, and proceeded to backstab the -10/20 the same way the -11 did in
the PDP-8.
I find it gratifying in recent years to find many of the -11 supporters seeing
their favorite models disappearing, such as the 11/70, etc., as they see the
-11 relegated to an also-ran product, destined to be scrapped entirely shortly.
In fact, I find it *more* gratifying to see the VAX being edged out in much the
same way as the Alpha takes over.
The point is that DEC often uses "shoot-yourself-in-the-foot" as part of its
marketing process, as the short-term goals and hidden agendas of individuals
guide the marketing strategy instead of someone high up enough to guide the
company's overall best interests, etc. (The DEC pyramid management and
middle-management conspiracy has been discussed elsewhere, etc.)
Will I come back here in 6 years to hear about how the Alphans are being
edged out of the company as the Betans take over?
cj "New often does not mean better" l
Matthew Curtin
> In article <gFqkVB...@bluemoon.use.com> cmcu...@bluemoon.use.com (Matthew
> >While I think that technically the Macs are, for the most part, neat
> >machines, I don't think I'd ever get one for several reasons. a) they're
> >closed boxes. The Apple II was the original open system, and everything
> >that I've used and liked has been an "open system."
>
> Gee, Macs have had slots since, oh the Mac II in 1986. You can get a 'closed'
> Mac if you don't need expansion, but you have many other choices.
Gee, uh, there's more to an "open system" than just slots. You still can't
buy all the pieces for a Macintosh and put it together yourself. Why do
think that in order to clone a Mac, you need to have the ROMs from a real
Macintosh? They just don't come much more proprietary than the Mac...
Mark Hittinger
Ah TOPS-10 was just fun. There were a lot of firsts for some of us. First
bulletin boards, first multi-user games, first time we wrote assembler and
stuck it into the OS.
How about the JFFO instruction? I miss the byte pointer stuff.
so - it was fun. more fun than vms, unix, ms-dos, windows, x, nt, or even
os/2! haw haw haw.
Peter da Silva
> DEC could have advertised it as "not the kind of computer your banker
> would buy" and the people who would buy it would understand perfectly.
"This is not your father's Oldsmobile"
--
Peter da Silva. <pe...@sugar.neosoft.com>.
`-_-' Oletko halannut suttasi t än ä än?
'U`
Tarjoilija, t äm ä ateria el ä ä viel ä.
Jason 'KodaK' Balicki
>Macintosh? They just don't come much more proprietary than the Mac...
Argh! Why does EVERYONE ignore the Amiga. :)
>| C. Matthew Curtin ! "But I am the enlightened one, they are |
>|_cmc...@bluemoon.use.com_____!_____________GNO_your_AppleIIGS!__________|
--Jason Balicki
ko...@mentor.cc.purdue.edu
Peter da Silva
> Most of the great leaps forward in computing were compatible with nothing and
> broke new ground. For example, the Macintosh.
And you were doing so well until this point.
The Mac was not a great leap forward. The Xerox 1100 and Star were a great leap
forward... the Mac was a shoddy knock off, and its advantage is social (cheap,
and Apple kept the developers sticking to their interface model) not technical.
Liam Greenwood
> c) "What do you get when you cross Apple and IBM? IBM."
--
Liam Greenwood ------ li...@durie.amigans.gen.nz ------ Wanganui, N.Z.
Don't tell my Mother I'm a programmer,
she thinks I'm a piano player in a brothel
Don Stokes
> But this is the problem of "all your eggs in one basket" since there were plans
> to make the TT-10 and the Jupiter, and all in-between. Moreover, the plan
> to make the VAX largely turns its back on a sizeable software investment in
> the -10/20 stuff. So, what do you tell the stockholders:
You seem to think the VAX was a completely standalone effort. It wasn't.
The 11/780 was basically a replacement for the pdp11/70, which had taken
the pdp11 line to about as large as it could practically get (as the 11/74
effort had largely proven). It was always intended that users of large
pdp11 systems would migrate to VAX, not users of the -10 line. (This is
1977 I'm talking about; not the lead-up to the cancelling of Jupiter.)
I don't think the VAX would have been as successful if the migration from
the pdp11 was there. RSX code had been known to just run on the VAX.
RSTS code took a little more persuasion, but it wasn't hard (and the VAX
BASIC compiler has a few bits of compatibility stuff for RSTS syscalls).
Other languages under RSTS were generally ports of RSX code and just worked.
Having ported quite a lot of code from RSTS/E to VMS, I can report that it's
not too difficult, and most of the problems were to do with differences in
the third party "database" software libraries on the two platforms.
I know of one outfit who were running an 11/70 with RSX, and were intending
to migrate to a VAX. Then the system disk on the 11/70 died. They worked
over a weekend to recompile the system onto the VAX (very few changes
required), mounted the 11/70's data disks on the VAX and continued as if
nothing had happened. There's a fair chance that just renaming the .TSKs
to .EXE and running under VAX RSX would have worked too, but they didn't
for some reason (the target VAX may have been one without compatibility
mode -- this was only a few years ago).
While the VAX was intended as a follow on from the pdp11 line, the
architecture allowed for a potentially bigger machine than the -10
architecture did, and the only limiting factor in building bigger and
bigger VAXes was the technology available. Compare this to the fact the
20xx line were already requiring tweaks to the architecture to support
bigger address spaces. The pdp11 line had already been through these kinds
of tweaks to get the physical address space up (16, 18 and 22 bit physical
addresses, each requiring different memory management code) and a couple of
half-hearted attempts to increase virtual memory (split I&D, supervisor
mode), and I can quite understand why DEC didn't really want to carry this
on into the 80s with the -10 line.
Remember that the -10 was a bunch of architectural and engineering tradeoffs
that were valid in the 60s, whereas the VAX's tradeoffs were valid in the
70s. Neither are valid now.
I suspect that when there was demand for a bigger VAX, DEC found themselves
facing the prospect of supporting two "big" machines, and had to make the
choice between them.
> I find it gratifying in recent years to find many of the -11 supporters seeing
> their favorite models disappearing, such as the 11/70, etc., as they see the
> -11 relegated to an also-ran product, destined to be scrapped entirely shortly.
> In fact, I find it *more* gratifying to see the VAX being edged out in much the
> same way as the Alpha takes over.
The 11/70 is 17 years old for chrissakes. Sure we get nostalgic about 'em.
It reigned as the most powerful genuine pdp11 until the 11/84, and even then
could outrun an 11/84 quite comfortably on real applications after you
factored in the I/O; it could be argued that it wasn't completely obsoleted
until 1990 with the release of the 11/94 (which *still* only has Unibus for
I/O). 15 years is a bloody long time for one model, and there's still more
of 'em chugging along just fine than any kind of -10.
I'm not sure when DEC stopped supplying 11/70s, but I'd guess that it was
after the 11/84 was released in '84/'85.
As for VAXes: it's been known for a while that the VAX is going to lose the
MIPS/$ race, but current VAXes are in the bunch with the not-quite-bleeding-
edge RISCs at this time even so. DEC has learned a thing or two from the
previous "upgrade" debacles; Alphas will run VMS just fine (or even unix if
you really must 8-). No-one's being left out in the cold like they were in
the -10 to VAX "migration".
> Will I come back here in 6 years to hear about how the Alphans are being
> edged out of the company as the Betans take over?
I doubt it. Apart from obvious losers, major architectures last a long
time at DEC, eg the pdp11 at 22 years (and still going strong), the PDP-8
at 25? 26? years, although now discontinued. The -6/-10 lasted nearly 20
years, and the VAX will still be kicking on its 20th birthday in 1997.
The Alpha is *not* an obvious loser. It'll be around well into the next
century, unless DEC goes down the tubes, in which case there won't be any
Betans. There's also no competition within DEC at this stage -- the VAX
crew have been co-operating closely with the Alpha lot -- the NVAX+ chip
in the VAX 7000 & 10000 is pin compatible with the 21064 for example.
--
Don Stokes, ZL2TNM (DS555) d...@zl2tnm.gen.nz (home)
Network Manager, Computing Services Centre d...@vuw.ac.nz (work)
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand +64-4-495-5052
Kimo B. Yap
...
>While the VAX was intended as a follow on from the pdp11 line, the
>architecture allowed for a potentially bigger machine than the -10
>architecture did, and the only limiting factor in building bigger and
>bigger VAXes was the technology available. Compare this to the fact the
>20xx line were already requiring tweaks to the architecture to support
>bigger address spaces. The pdp11 line had already been through these kinds
>of tweaks to get the physical address space up (16, 18 and 22 bit physical
>addresses, each requiring different memory management code) and a couple of
>half-hearted attempts to increase virtual memory (split I&D, supervisor
>mode), and I can quite understand why DEC didn't really want to carry this
>on into the 80s with the -10 line.
While I'll admit that going from KA/KI architecture to KL architecture was
pretty crocky in terms of extended addressing (although I still feel they
did a lot better than 8086/8 to 80286/80386 transition), going beyond the
actual KL architecture should not have been necessary for a while. Although
the KL itself was 32 sections (512 pages of 1024 36-bit words), the KL
architecture spec was 30-bit addressing (4096 sections). I don't know
about the -20, but I know when I did the -10 stuff I made the monitor such
that going to 4096 sections was at least theoretically possible from the
23-bit 32-section addressing. The big change was getting out of section 0;
after that it was pretty much the same. I think there were "only a couple"
of places where 23-bit maximum size to addresses (or 14-bit page numbers or
5-bit section numbers, whichever you prefer) were taken advantage of :-).-kby
Rick Kelly
>In article <5VJoVB...@bluemoon.use.com> cmcu...@bluemoon.use.com (Matthew Curtin) writes:
>>Macintosh? They just don't come much more proprietary than the Mac...
>
>Argh! Why does EVERYONE ignore the Amiga. :)
Probably because there is no one here from Commodore claiming that the
Amiga is an open system.
Also, this is a group where many people would consider the Mac to be
an open cistern.
Rick Kelly
>The 11/70 is 17 years old for chrissakes. Sure we get nostalgic about 'em.
>It reigned as the most powerful genuine pdp11 until the 11/84, and even then
>could outrun an 11/84 quite comfortably on real applications after you
>factored in the I/O; it could be argued that it wasn't completely obsoleted
>until 1990 with the release of the 11/94 (which *still* only has Unibus for
>I/O). 15 years is a bloody long time for one model, and there's still more
>of 'em chugging along just fine than any kind of -10.
>I'm not sure when DEC stopped supplying 11/70s, but I'd guess that it was
>after the 11/84 was released in '84/'85.
The death of the 11/70, in the US, was an FCC ruling that deemed it to
noisy.
Of course, there is still the 11/94 and the MicroPDP-11.
>As for VAXes: it's been known for a while that the VAX is going to lose the
>MIPS/$ race, but current VAXes are in the bunch with the not-quite-bleeding-
>edge RISCs at this time even so. DEC has learned a thing or two from the
>previous "upgrade" debacles; Alphas will run VMS just fine (or even unix if
>you really must 8-). No-one's being left out in the cold like they were in
>the -10 to VAX "migration".
Exactly.
>I doubt it. Apart from obvious losers, major architectures last a long
>time at DEC, eg the pdp11 at 22 years (and still going strong), the PDP-8
>at 25? 26? years, although now discontinued. The -6/-10 lasted nearly 20
>years, and the VAX will still be kicking on its 20th birthday in 1997.
>The Alpha is *not* an obvious loser. It'll be around well into the next
>century, unless DEC goes down the tubes, in which case there won't be any
>Betans. There's also no competition within DEC at this stage -- the VAX
>crew have been co-operating closely with the Alpha lot -- the NVAX+ chip
>in the VAX 7000 & 10000 is pin compatible with the 21064 for example.
A friend of mine, who works for DEC ( in "The Mill" and other sites ), tells
me that they used to move from 10's to Vaxs interdepartmently by pulling the
boards out of 10's and stuffing in a set of Vax boards.
Jim Haynes
There are also those who complained about the PDP11->VAX transition; they
would have preferred a 32-bit PDP11.
Cheryl Lins
>
>PowerPC is UNIX with a Mac emulation on top.
>
You're talking about PowerOpen. PowerPC is the name of a series of computer
chips. The 601 is the first (reported in EE Times, MacWeek, etc). PowerOpen
is a Unix implementation running on the PowerPC chip. The PowerPC based
Macintoshes will not be based on Unix. There is 68020 emulation at the
bottom. This was all publicly announced at the WWDC in May, '92.
--
Cheryl Lins Oberon Paladin and Witch-in-training li...@apple.com
"Capitalism has failed." -- Consolidated
Peter da Silva
> mode), and I can quite understand why DEC didn't really want to carry this
> on into the 80s with the -10 line.
I'm amazed DEC put the split-I&D mode in the -11, because so far as I can
tell they didn't provide any O/S support for it until a pretty late release
of RSX-11. When I was using the -11 heavily, the only O/S that let you USE
split-I&D seemed to be 2BSD and derivitives.
> The 11/70 is 17 years old for chrissakes. [...]
> 15 years is a bloody long time for one model, and there's still more
> of 'em chugging along just fine than any kind of -10.
Yes, remember DEC is planning on bringing the Alpha replacement onto the
stage 15 years from now, and that's a product line... not just a model.
I mean, in terms of execution environment a PDP-11 is just a little less
desirable than an 80286. If you want a perfect sensation of what hacking
on an -11 is like, run an old version of Coherent or Minix that only
supports small model.
And I can understand Charles Lasner's devotion to the systems he used when
he was just getting started, but 4K of 12 bit words on the -8 was painful
back in the late '70s when I was using one, unless you were doing some
really trivial stuff. By the end my pocket calculator had nearly as much
memory.
Crowing that the -11 users are finally getting their comeuppance is sad:
I'm an -11 fan and even I think DEC has kept it alive (or been forced to
keep it alive) way longer than I ever expected.
Peter da Silva
> is a Unix implementation running on the PowerPC chip. The PowerPC based
> Macintoshes will not be based on Unix. There is 68020 emulation at the
> bottom.
...and then I very carefully boggled my mind.
Dazed N. Confused
> I don't think it's all to do with the machine, it's the
> spirit behind it, the spirit that created it, and that which keeps it
> going. The spirit that Apple has forgotten all about.
The "spirit" behind brain-dead Prodos... Having to use PREFIX..
not having a CLI... Incompatibility with almost every ported program
because there's no command line ability... [Although, I haven't
been keeping up with the II world, and I think there are some shells
out there, now.]
Ug. The best thing that could happen to the II line, really,
is an entirely new operating system. (What was that about unix on a GS?)
Forget Prodos. And why does the Finder have to look exactly like a
Mac's finder? Don't we all realize that GUI's are usele--err...
> c) "What do you get when you cross Apple and IBM? IBM." I HATE
> IBM.
Uh, you really mean 80x386 architechure. I'd have to say I hate
it too, but it's cheap and it runs Linux. :)
--Jon
j...@vector0.SAC.CA.US Life is like a kiwi.
Rich Alderson
>In article <1992Dec11.0...@u.washington.edu> fet...@pike.u.washington.edu (David Fetrow) writes:
>>In article <1992Dec10.1...@csrd.uiuc.edu> j-g...@uiuc.edu writes:
>>>
>>>What killed off the PDP-10 architecture?
>>>
>
>Since nobody else has said this I will and will endure the flanes. In
>the early 80s DEC had 3 choices:
>
>1) kill the 10/20
>
>2) kill the VAX
>
>3) Continue to develop and market both, acknowledging that they were
>competing for exactly the same customers; that every sale of one was a
>lost sale for the other.
>Which would you choose?
2.
>Which would you choose if you were a stockholder?
2.
No smileys.
--
Rich Alderson 'I wish life was not so short,' he thought. 'Languages take
such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.'
--J. R. R. Tolkien,
alde...@leland.stanford.edu _The Lost Road_
Mark Hittinger
>Crowing that the -11 users are finally getting their comeuppance is sad:
>I'm an -11 fan and even I think DEC has kept it alive (or been forced to
>keep it alive) way longer than I ever expected.
We were checking used prices the other day and noticed that the used
price of the vax8650 had fallen below that of the used high end pdp-11.
I'm waiting for my favorite PDP-11 groupie to call me up and give me
some crap about that (I committed the foul deed of converting to, learning,
managing, and advocating Vaxes). Oh well - I'll just ask him when he thinks
he can port WNT to the 11!
are we going to be able to get a KL emulator before 1999?
"you can hack anything you want - with TECO and DDT!"
Rick Kelly
>>
>>PowerPC is UNIX with a Mac emulation on top.
>>
>
>You're talking about PowerOpen. PowerPC is the name of a series of computer
>chips. The 601 is the first (reported in EE Times, MacWeek, etc). PowerOpen
>is a Unix implementation running on the PowerPC chip. The PowerPC based
>Macintoshes will not be based on Unix. There is 68020 emulation at the
>bottom. This was all publicly announced at the WWDC in May, '92.
There seems to be two "rumors" floating around.
1. PowerOpen, which will run on the PowerPC, will be a base OS consisting
of a mixture of AIX and A/UX, with a MacOS emulation and Multifinder
running on top.
2. Taligent, which will run on the PowerPC, will be released without any
application compatibility to any other OS.
Why would Apple base an OS on a processor chip that they no longer support
in their product line?
Charles Lasner
Speaking as if I were a stock-holder, then apparently this is true, since
DEC did 1) instead, and look where they are now. Clearly what they did was
1), and clearly it hasn't been good for the bottom line. While it can't be
alternated, since in the Real World (tm) you only get one chance, it's
entirely possible that had they chosen 2) they would today be better off.
Perhaps we need opinions on where DEC would be today. Imagine a DEC history
where the VAX was never a seriously pursued architecture (or at least wasn't
done so at the -10's expense) and thus now DEC would be at a new cross-roads
regarding what to do about the various product lines with the Alpha just
coming up to speed now, but without all the VAX activity, etc.
cjl
Mika Iisakkila
Aaaaagghh! Now you said it! It won't take long before THEY come here
and there goes another fave newsgroup down the drain, right after
comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware...
--
Segmented Memory Helps Structure Software
Sarr J. Blumson
>Perhaps we need opinions on where DEC would be today. Imagine a DEC history
>where the VAX was never a seriously pursued architecture (or at least wasn't
>done so at the -10's expense) and thus now DEC would be at a new cross-roads
>regarding what to do about the various product lines with the Alpha just
>coming up to speed now, but without all the VAX activity, etc.
>
>cjl
>
A tricky one. In this reality what's killed DEC and all of the other
large system builders is the appearance of small, cheap machines, all
of which adopted many of the features (eg the evil 8 bit byte) that
cjl hates. If DEC were trying to compete with 36 bit word machines,
they might be right where they are now. On the other hand many of
those microprocessors were inspired by the 11, and if DEC had never
started down that path maybe the 8008 would have been a 12 bit
machine. Of course there was IBM too...
(Sarr Blumson)
CP/M lives!
>
> A tricky one. In this reality what's killed DEC and all of the other
> large system builders is the appearance of small, cheap machines, all
> of which adopted many of the features (eg the evil 8 bit byte) that
> cjl hates. If DEC were trying to compete with 36 bit word machines,
> they might be right where they are now. On the other hand many of
> those microprocessors were inspired by the 11, and if DEC had never
> started down that path maybe the 8008 would have been a 12 bit
> machine. Of course there was IBM too...
The 8008 inspired by the '11? It's about as far away from an 11 as you can
get! The 4004 probably would still have been a 4-bit machine, and the 8008
would still have evolved from that.
Cheryl Lins
>There seems to be two "rumors" floating around.
>
>1. PowerOpen, which will run on the PowerPC, will be a base OS consisting
> of a mixture of AIX and A/UX, with a MacOS emulation and Multifinder
> running on top.
>
>2. Taligent, which will run on the PowerPC, will be released without any
> application compatibility to any other OS.
>
>Why would Apple base an OS on a processor chip that they no longer support
>in their product line?
If i were writing a _new_ OS, i'd agree that that would be a Dumb Idea. But
there happens to be millions of existing Macs out there with lots of software.
Now, do you want to know a _really_ Dumb Idea? Produce a new personal
computer running a brand new computer chip and a new OS and don't have any
application software to run on it at introduction (let alone thousands of
software titles). Apple engineers are not that dumb. Even Apple managers aren't
that dumb. :-)
Some of us do have a clue, even if the rest of the world hasn't figured that
out yet.
--
Cheryl Lins Oberon Paladin and Princess-in-training li...@apple.com
"We are the guardians of Freedom!" -- Ministry
Douglas W. Jones,201H MLH,3193350740,3193382879
> can get!
Yes, but the other big microprocessor familily that has survived to the
present, the Motorola 68000, clearly borrows from the -11.
Furthermore, as someone who's programmed both Intel 8080 and PDP-11
machines, I've noticed that, although the instruction sets are wildly
different, the assembly language of the 8080 owes quite a bit to that
of the PDP-11. That is, conventions for comments, labels, and white
space are DEC-ish. Furthermore, when Zilog introduced their Z-80, they
managed to produce a new and incompatable assembly language that made
the horribly irregular underlying machine look regular at the assembly
language level, and the notation they used was clearly inspired by the
PDP-11 notation. Finally, when Intel responded with the 8086, they
borrowed some of Zilog's innovative work in order to make an ugly
architecture look tolerable.
So, assembly language programmers on the Intel family owe quite a bit
to DEC, even if the underlying architecture is a *&^%$#!@#$%^& mess.
Doug Jones
jo...@cs.uiowa.edu
Jeffrey T Berntsen
I beg to differ. That "new personal computer running a brand new computer
chip and new OS and no S/W" bit is _exactly_ what Apple did when they
introduced the Mac in the first place when they already had a thriving
platform out there. Based on my experiences with Apple, I could easily seem
doing the same thing again... Just my $.03
Jeff Berntsen
je...@world.std.com
Don Stokes
> Speaking as if I were a stock-holder, then apparently this is true, since
> DEC did 1) instead, and look where they are now. Clearly what they did was
> 1), and clearly it hasn't been good for the bottom line. While it can't be
> alternated, since in the Real World (tm) you only get one chance, it's
> entirely possible that had they chosen 2) they would today be better off.
Oh come on, Charles!
You're saying DEC is having trouble today because they killed the -10?
That's like saying they're in trouble because they cancelled de Castro's
project. Or because they never built the PDP-2, or because they should
have stuck with making modules and not got into computers at all.
DEC today is a casualty of the "open systems" and commodity computing wars.
If anything, the failure to market a decent *low end* computer in the early
80s has more to do with DEC's woes now than anything they did in the
supermini/mainframe market.
> Perhaps we need opinions on where DEC would be today. Imagine a DEC history
> where the VAX was never a seriously pursued architecture (or at least wasn't
> done so at the -10's expense) and thus now DEC would be at a new cross-roads
> regarding what to do about the various product lines with the Alpha just
> coming up to speed now, but without all the VAX activity, etc.
If DEC had pushed the -10, a "mainframe" architecture, at the expense of
the minicomputer market it grew up in and knew best, they would now be in
the kind of shit that the mainframe makers are in.
Rick Kelly
>In article <921215...@rmkhome.UUCP> r...@rmkhome.UUCP (Rick Kelly) writes:
>>There seems to be two "rumors" floating around.
>>
>>1. PowerOpen, which will run on the PowerPC, will be a base OS consisting
>> of a mixture of AIX and A/UX, with a MacOS emulation and Multifinder
>> running on top.
>>
>>2. Taligent, which will run on the PowerPC, will be released without any
>> application compatibility to any other OS.
>>
>>Why would Apple base an OS on a processor chip that they no longer support
>>in their product line?
>
>If i were writing a _new_ OS, i'd agree that that would be a Dumb Idea. But
>there happens to be millions of existing Macs out there with lots of software.
Well, that depends on how literally the emulate the 68020, and if it wouldn't
be better to emulate the 68030.
>Now, do you want to know a _really_ Dumb Idea? Produce a new personal
>computer running a brand new computer chip and a new OS and don't have any
>application software to run on it at introduction (let alone thousands of
>software titles). Apple engineers are not that dumb. Even Apple managers aren't
>that dumb. :-)
Which machine is that? Alpha? Between OpenVMS and UNIX they have plenty of
apps.
DEC is only planning to sell NT on one low-end model.
>Some of us do have a clue, even if the rest of the world hasn't figured that
>out yet.
When the Mac ships with a real command line shell, then maybe some people
will look on it more favorably.
Nicholas C. Weaver
}In article <1992Dec16.1...@gallant.apple.com} che...@gallant.apple.com (Cheryl Lins) writes:
}}In article <921215...@rmkhome.UUCP} r...@rmkhome.UUCP (Rick Kelly) writes:
}}}There seems to be two "rumors" floating around.
}}}
}}}1. PowerOpen, which will run on the PowerPC, will be a base OS consisting
}}} of a mixture of AIX and A/UX, with a MacOS emulation and Multifinder
}}} running on top.
}}}
}}}2. Taligent, which will run on the PowerPC, will be released without any
}}} application compatibility to any other OS.
}}}
}}}Why would Apple base an OS on a processor chip that they no longer support
}}}in their product line?
}}
}}If i were writing a _new_ OS, i'd agree that that would be a Dumb Idea. But
}}there happens to be millions of existing Macs out there with lots of software.
}
}Well, that depends on how literally the emulate the 68020, and if it wouldn't
}be better to emulate the 68030.
They don't really need to. If I recall, the only real difference
between the 020 and the 030 is the PMMU is built into the 030. Motorola's
chip designations are that even numbers are major increases, odd numbers are
minor upgrades. You don't hear about the 68010. (Although the 68060 isn't
as bing a leap over the 040 as the 040 was over the 030). There may be
other differences, but I don't thinky they will be too significant.
}}Now, do you want to know a _really_ Dumb Idea? Produce a new personal
}}computer running a brand new computer chip and a new OS and don't have any
}}application software to run on it at introduction (let alone thousands of
}}software titles). Apple engineers are not that dumb. Even Apple managers aren't
}}that dumb. :-)
It's not necessarily dumb. Having a sub-feature that's backwards
compatibility is nice these days, but is not required per-se. Witness
NeXTstep for an example, although they are going to have some sort of
DOS/Windoz function on NeXTstep 486 (For those who bought the wrong computer
in the first place, and are regretting their decision :)
}Which machine is that? Alpha? Between OpenVMS and UNIX they have plenty of
}apps.
}
}DEC is only planning to sell NT on one low-end model.
}
}}Some of us do have a clue, even if the rest of the world hasn't figured that
}}out yet.
}
}When the Mac ships with a real command line shell, then maybe some people
}will look on it more favorably.
They do, it's called A/UX. And it is something that they seem to be
letting languish at the sideline. Apple today could release something that
is 95% of what talegent promisses to be if instead, two years ago, they
built something GOOD on A/UX, and started making it multi-platform. Also
make a decent development environment (C++ or Objective-C, a solid interface
builder and debugger. Hey, just hack GCC for the compiler).
The biggest uglyness that I see with NT and Taligent is the emulator
approach. Both promise to be multi-platform, but they both emulate a chip
for cross computer work. I think the fat binary concept (the application
wrapper has binaries for all different computers, and just uses the one
appropriate for the job. Of course, make it strippable), works better
because of the performance bottleneck from emulation. This requires
slightly more work for the developer. (He has to go somewhere to compile on
the other architectures, but that is simply the few hours it takes to
compile soemthing), and a slight lag when a new architecture is announced
for the OS, but the end user benefits from better performance. Emulation
should only be used for backwards compatability to a previous
OS/architecture, such as System 6*/680x0 software for an Apple RISC machine,
although it is better to just make cross compilation painless in the long
run.
However, this does also complicate the job for the OS manufacturer,
dependong on how much the manufacturer is relying on the emulation to run
his GUI/OS if the manufacturer is going the emulation route.
--
Nicholas C. Weaver nwe...@soda.berkeley.edu
It is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, .signifying nothing.
CP/M lives!
>
> Furthermore, as someone who's programmed both Intel 8080 and PDP-11
> machines, I've noticed that, although the instruction sets are wildly
> different, the assembly language of the 8080 owes quite a bit to that
> of the PDP-11. That is, conventions for comments, labels, and white
> space are DEC-ish. Furthermore, when Zilog introduced their Z-80, they
If only they had managed to borrow the convention
MOV source, destination
instead of their screwy
MOV destination, source
I would get a lot less confused hopping between Intel and DEC processors.
Frank - Hardware Hacker - Borger
>pe...@NeoSoft.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
>
>>Crowing that the -11 users are finally getting their comeuppance is sad:
>>I'm an -11 fan and even I think DEC has kept it alive (or been forced to
>>keep it alive) way longer than I ever expected.
>
I can still buy parts for a 20-year-old RK05, stock, out of DEC's
electronic store. Long as the machines are reliable, economically
viable units, people will use them and buy CPUs and parts.
Also note that although DEC no longer sells PDP8's, they still sell
parts, and there is still a reasonable trade in used 8's and parts.
Again because there are enough out there still being used.
Sadly for the 10's and 20's they really took up too much valuable
real-estate and power. Probably the real killer was lack of enough
trained service people to keep them running.
>We were checking used prices the other day and noticed that the used
>price of the vax8650 had fallen below that of the used high end pdp-11.
>
>I'm waiting for my favorite PDP-11 groupie to call me up and give me
>some crap about that (I committed the foul deed of converting to, learning,
>managing, and advocating Vaxes). Oh well - I'll just ask him when he thinks
>he can port WNT to the 11!
Course not. But I've got applications that were written on a PDP11,
work well on a PDP11, but go into turtle mode when ported to an
already overloaded VAX. If I can do the same thing on a VAX and a
PDP11, but the PDP11 gives me better response, (because everyone
thinks our 750 is a much hotter box than or 11/44, and therefore
writes large programs that go crunch, crunch, crunch on large amounts
of data...) and we pay about $15,000/year VAX service, versus about
$800/year buying parts of the surplus market for the PDP11, should
I port everything.
>
>are we going to be able to get a KL emulator before 1999?
>
>"you can hack anything you want - with TECO and DDT!"
I can still hack on the 11 quite easily. (My definition of hack is
that a simple basic or fortran program can directly talk to the
mag-tape driver to tell it to write an eof or do a backspace, or
can stuff a command line buffer and execute any system cusp.)
Sadly, I can't hack easily on the VAX. The hacks are there, but
I have to deal with syntax up the wazoo, f$lexical(so's_your_old_man)
a grey wall, (used to be orange,) of manuals, and a general climate
such that I tend to issue a command of set process/priv=potty before
I go to the bathroom.
Frank R. Borger - Physicist __ Internet: Fr...@rover.uchicago.edu
Michael Reese - Univ. of Chicago |___ Phone : 312-791-8075 fax : 567-7455
Center for Radiation Therapy | |_) _ In the first place God made idiots.
| \|_) That was for practice. Then he made
"Birthplace of Softball" |_) school boards. - Mark Twain
Frank - Hardware Hacker - Borger
>The 8008 inspired by the '11? It's about as far away from an 11 as you can
>get! The 4004 probably would still have been a 4-bit machine, and the 8008
>would still have evolved from that.
The 4004 was inspired by the pdp8, not the 11. Subsequent Z80,
80xx, 80xxx, etc were evolutions of that.
The other major player in the pc world today, the Motorola 6xxx
series, was modeled on the PDP11.
What I find strange is that everyone expounds about multi-tasking
on the 80xxx series, which by their basic structure, are single-
user machines, while the 6xxxx motorola chips, with their basic
foundation much more supportive of multi-tasking, are used in an
inherintly single-user MAC.
Cheryl Lins
>
>I beg to differ. That "new personal computer running a brand new computer
>chip and new OS and no S/W" bit is _exactly_ what Apple did when they
>introduced the Mac in the first place when they already had a thriving
>platform out there. Based on my experiences with Apple, I could easily seem
>doing the same thing again... Just my $.03
Wake up Jeff. That was nearly 10 years ago. Remember the Commodore PET, the
Tandy TRS-80, and the other wonderful 8-bit so-called personal computers
circa 1982-3? And where are they now? They are on the dustbin of history.
Technology has outpaced their capabilities.
Apple could do what you describe above in 1984 for 2 reasons:
1. the introduction of the IBM PC which made personal computers acceptable
to business,
2. a radically new user interface paradigm beyond the command line making
it easier to train and use a computer by the computer-illerate.
(The 2nd point is not to say anything about who invented GUI's. But it is
obvious that the Macintosh was the first commerically successful machine
incorporating such an interface.)
Today there are say 30+ million personal computers out there. The Apple II is
a very small percentage of this total. I like the idea of working for a
computer company that isn't laying off n% of its workforce (including
engineers) as are DEC, IBM, etc. Even the clone-makers are cutting everything
possible simply to stay in business.
I doubt very seriously that Apple would be a 7+ BILLION dollar company today
on the merits of the Apple II. This doesn't mean that there isn't a very nice
niche business for the Apple II. But it certainly isn't going to take Apple
Computer into the 21st century.
Cheryl Lins
>
>will look on it more favorably.
Ha-ha-ha!!! You make a funny, no?
Only those brought up on dinosaur derived systems and mentalities. And i'm so
very certain that Mom and Pop want to be programmers (even in the very limited
form of writing shell commands). But that's a discussion best suited for the
'famous flame wars' thread (GUI vs command line). And I have better things to
do than spend time trying to convince you otherwise or start a new flame war.
Paul M. Wexelblat
In article <1992Dec17.1...@cc.usu.edu>, iv...@cc.usu.edu (CP/M lives!) writes:
|> From: iv...@cc.usu.edu (CP/M lives!)
|> Subject: Re: 8008 related to PDP-11? (was: What is so greate ...)
|> Date: 17 Dec 92 16:15:45 GMT
|>
|> In article <1992Dec16.2...@news.uiowa.edu>, jo...@pyrite.cs.uiowa.edu (Douglas W. Jones,201H MLH,3193350740,3193382879) writes:
|> >
|> > Furthermore, as someone who's programmed both Intel 8080 and PDP-11
|> > machines, I've noticed that, although the instruction sets are wildly
|> > different, the assembly language of the 8080 owes quite a bit to that
|> > of the PDP-11. That is, conventions for comments, labels, and white
|> > space are DEC-ish. Furthermore, when Zilog introduced their Z-80, they
|>
|> If only they had managed to borrow the convention
. . .
Of course the PDP-11 Assembler is based on the Non-DEC Assembler
for the PDP-1... (The PDP-1 was a single address machine and thus didn't
have the source-dest vs. dest-source problem.) However, many of the
syntax/punctuation conventions that we associate with DEC were not theirs
at all. Colon for tags, semi for comments, etc. (They didn't even write DDT.)
The earliest PDP-1 Assembler used two characters for symbols (18 bit machine)
programmers always left a few words as patch space to fix problems. (Jump to patch
space, do new code, jump back) That space conventionally was named FU:
which stood for Fxxx Up, the place where you fixed Fxxx Ups. When spoken,
it was known as FU space. Later Assemblers ( e.g. MIDAS allowed three char tags
so FU became FOO, and as ALL PDP-1 programmers will tell you that was FOO space.
I will never be convinvced by and computer type (who was unborn in those days)
of ANY other origin of the term FOO in the parlance.
--
...Wex
Frank - Hardware Hacker - Borger
macro code.
----- source line counter
|
generated code (hex) v source code comments
--------------------- -- ---------------------- -------------------------
0000 0001 0001 0044 33 fid: .word 1,1,0 ;file id of index file
..
56 68 3C 0006 60 movzwl (r8),r6 ;Get the size of the buffer
58 04 A8 D0 0009 61 movl 4(r8),r8 ;get address of buffer
Please note that source code is read from left to right, (and the
moves go from the left operand to the right operand,) but the
generated hex code is read from right to left. Also, line counter
is decimal, but generated code is all hex.
Sure is easy to debug!!!
Peter da Silva
> Oh well - I'll just ask him when he thinks he can port WNT to the 11!
Why in the world would you want to port WNT to *anything*? Bad enough that
it exists in the first place.
Peter da Silva
> DEC did 1) instead, and look where they are now.
Doing pretty well, actually, compared to Gould, CDC, Spurroughs, and so on.
> Perhaps we need opinions on where DEC would be today. Imagine a DEC history
> where the VAX was never a seriously pursued architecture (or at least wasn't
> done so at the -10's expense) and thus now DEC would be at a new cross-roads
> regarding what to do about the various product lines with the Alpha just
> coming up to speed now, but without all the VAX activity, etc.
The Alpha, or something very much like it, would have already been on the
market for at least a couple of years now and the -10 would be just as dead,
unless you know some magic way of extending the -10's address space without
blowing binary compatibility.
Speaking as an employee of a company that has just crawled out of the Univac
1100 mire, and that would probably be using -10s right now if they'd been
available, I'm glad DEC went the way it did. There's more than one way to run
out of horsepower, and Virtual Fortran (Sperry's answer to the '60s mainframe
address space crunch) really sucks worse than a VAX.
Peter da Silva
> computer running a brand new computer chip and a new OS and don't have any
> application software to run on it at introduction (let alone thousands of
> software titles).
Can't argue with that. Problem is, that old OS has some really raw spots that
can't be ironed out. There's a lot to be said for emulation... look how well
it did for Windows (not that I'm holding up Windows OR OS/2 as an ideal of a
good operating system, mind you).
> Apple engineers are not that dumb. Even Apple managers aren't that dumb. :-)
I don't think Apple is dumb. Apple just seems to do some REALLY weird stuff,
though. Like refusing to put a CLI on the Mac, so even now very little of
the big-name free software runs on it because none of the big-name free
software types are willing to do a special (and quite different) version of
their software just for it. If there was a CLI, even downplayed, then they
could get things like Ghostscript up in no time at all.
Peter da Silva
> ko...@mentor.cc.purdue.edu (Jason 'KodaK' Balicki) writes:
> >Argh! Why does EVERYONE ignore the Amiga. :)
> Aaaaagghh! Now you said it! It won't take long before THEY come here
We've been here all along, you great steaming leather-bound clockwork git.
Ron Dippold
>> ko...@mentor.cc.purdue.edu (Jason 'KodaK' Balicki) writes:
>> >Argh! Why does EVERYONE ignore the Amiga. :)
>> Aaaaagghh! Now you said it! It won't take long before THEY come here
>We've been here all along, you great steaming leather-bound clockwork git.
I think he means the people who put the big ugly ascii barphic checks
in their sigs.
--
A fool and his money stabilize the economy.
Joe Morris
[responding to a comment on the PDP-1 assembler as an origin for the
syntax of the assemblers for later PDP-xx systems]
>As anyone knows who used PAL-8, PAL-III, MACRO-8, etc. on the PDP-8. (Comma
>for tags, slash for comments, the letter `I' for indirection, etc.)
I can't speak for the later PDP-xx assemblers, but on the PDP-1 the *symbol*
"i" was used to specify an indirect operation. The MACRO (that's the name
of the assembler; no qualifiers were appended to it) syntax used a space
as an implied addition operator, and all components of the instruction in the
Flexowriter input had values which were added together. Thus if the symbol
"foobar" represents a word at address 456 (octal), then the instruction:
dio i foobar
will be compiled as the sum of three values:
320000 dio
10000 i
456 foobar
------
330456 the resulting 18-bit instruction which would deposit the
contents of the I/O register in the location pointed to
by "foobar".
The value of the symbol "i" was hardwired into the assembler's symbol
table.
A comma following a symbol defines that symbol as the current location
counter; a slash following an expression changes the location counter
to the value of the expression. The current location counter is
referenced with a period, and a string beginning with a slash is a comment.
Joe Morris / MITRE
Cheryl Lins
>In article <1992Dec17....@gallant.apple.com> che...@gallant.apple.com (Cheryl Lins) writes:
>>In article <921216...@rmkhome.UUCP> r...@rmkhome.UUCP (Rick Kelly) writes:
>>>
>>>When the Mac ships with a real command line shell, then maybe some people
>>>will look on it more favorably.
>>
>>Ha-ha-ha!!! You make a funny, no?
>>
>>Only those brought up on dinosaur derived systems and mentalities. And i'm so
>>very certain that Mom and Pop want to be programmers (even in the very limited
>>form of writing shell commands).
>
>if not the primary interface. They needn't be dinosaurlike either. Command
>parsing is about to make a comeback, even in "user friendly machines" such as
>whatever the Mac turns into.
I can agree with the first two sentences. And CLI's are more useful to the
'power' user (or programmer) than the casual loser. And Apple does have a
CLI (even if it's not a released product yet) and it's called AppleScript (tm).
I could say a lot more about how way kool it is and how it'll blow away every
thing else that ever existed, but I live having a job ;-)
> Don't believe me?
>
> Voice driven menues are a bigger pain than voice driven commands. It's
>just a microphone instead of a keyboard.
I've never been a fan of voice input. Just imagine your current work
environment and _everyone's_ talking into their computer. Can you see the
chaos and confusion? The computer will listen to anyone's input, not just
mine. Plus the fact that I wouldn't want the annoyance of listening to other
people talk when I'm trying to think. Voice IO might be fine when you're
Home Alone, but after talking all day, I bet larengitis (sp?) becomes an
occupational hazard of computing.
--
Cheryl Lins Oberon Paladin and Vegetarian-in-training li...@apple.com
Michael T Pins
che...@gallant.apple.com (Cheryl Lins) writes:
>In article <921216...@rmkhome.UUCP> r...@rmkhome.UUCP (Rick Kelly) writes:
->
->When the Mac ships with a real command line shell, then maybe some people
->will look on it more favorably.
>Ha-ha-ha!!! You make a funny, no?
>Only those brought up on dinosaur derived systems and mentalities. And i'm so
>very certain that Mom and Pop want to be programmers (even in the very limited
>form of writing shell commands). But that's a discussion best suited for the
>'famous flame wars' thread (GUI vs command line). And I have better things to
>do than spend time trying to convince you otherwise or start a new flame war.
No, he make a good point, no?
No one is asking Apple to do away with their GUI (which *would* be really
stupid). What people are asking for is an alternative, in other words, a CLI.
Only those who are perpetually computer illiterate don't see the use of a CLI.
The GUI is wonderful for Mom and Pop, secretaries, and for opening comm
programs, word processers, etc. But for a lot of things, a CLI is considerably
more powerful, not to mention quicker. The Amiga has had both since the day it
came out (and please, no Amiga vs Mac flame wars), and Amiga users know how
nice it is to have both. Steve Jobs figured this out (remember him?) which is
why the NeXT gives you both. Only Apple is still lagging behind.
--
*****************************************************************************
* Michael Pins | Internet: ami...@isca.uiowa.edu *
* ISCA's Amiga Librarian | #include <std.disclaimer> *
*****************************************************************************
Mark Hittinger
>In article <1992Dec16.0...@netsys.com> bu...@netsys.com (Mark Hittinger) writes:
>> Oh well - I'll just ask him when he thinks he can port WNT to the 11!
>Why in the world would you want to port WNT to *anything*? Bad enough that
>it exists in the first place.
Oh come on - hahahaha - VMS is too expensive, I'm *still* fixing corrupted
unix file systems, WNT is inevitable. That doesn't mean I'll be happy
though.
David Kelman
>
>che...@gallant.apple.com (Cheryl Lins) writes:
>
>>In article <921216...@rmkhome.UUCP> r...@rmkhome.UUCP (Rick Kelly) writes:
< stuff deleted >
>
>>Ha-ha-ha!!! You make a funny, no?
>
>>Only those brought up on dinosaur derived systems and mentalities. And i'm so
>>very certain that Mom and Pop want to be programmers (even in the very limited
>>form of writing shell commands). But that's a discussion best suited for the
>>'famous flame wars' thread (GUI vs command line). And I have better things to
>>do than spend time trying to convince you otherwise or start a new flame war.
>
>No, he make a good point, no?
>No one is asking Apple to do away with their GUI (which *would* be really
>stupid). What people are asking for is an alternative, in other words, a CLI.
>Only those who are perpetually computer illiterate don't see the use of a CLI.
>The GUI is wonderful for Mom and Pop, secretaries, and for opening comm
>programs, word processers, etc. But for a lot of things, a CLI is considerably
>more powerful, not to mention quicker. The Amiga has had both since the day it
>came out (and please, no Amiga vs Mac flame wars), and Amiga users know how
>nice it is to have both. Steve Jobs figured this out (remember him?) which is
>why the NeXT gives you both. Only Apple is still lagging behind.
>
This last August I was in the market for a new computer. I was
looking to spend between $3000-$5000 on a system that I thought would last me
at least a couple years, that I could be productive on and could play
with. I looked at the Mac, and while it had a lot of features that I
wanted, like the ability to read both Mac and IBM disks, it didn't have a way
for me to get to a command line, which I like (at 29, I don't think of
myself as a dinosaur). IBM doesn't have a real integrated GUI (you still
need to go to the command line to do system stuff with Windows), so I bought
a demo model of a color NeXTStation at the university bookstore. If the Mac
had a CLI, I would have probably gone with it. Instead it's Apple's loss and
NeXT's gain.
David Kelman
kel...@vaxe.niehs.nih.gov
--
The opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Campus Office for Information
Technology, or the Experimental Bulletin Board Service.
internet: laUNChpad.unc.edu or 152.2.22.80
Rick Kelly
>In article <921216...@rmkhome.UUCP} r...@rmkhome.UUCP (Rick Kelly) writes:
>}In article <1992Dec16.1...@gallant.apple.com} che...@gallant.apple.com (Cheryl Lins) writes:
>}}In article <921215...@rmkhome.UUCP} r...@rmkhome.UUCP (Rick Kelly) writes:
>}}}There seems to be two "rumors" floating around.
>}}}
>}}}1. PowerOpen, which will run on the PowerPC, will be a base OS consisting
>}}} of a mixture of AIX and A/UX, with a MacOS emulation and Multifinder
>}}} running on top.
>}}}
>}}}2. Taligent, which will run on the PowerPC, will be released without any
>}}} application compatibility to any other OS.
>}}}
>}}}Why would Apple base an OS on a processor chip that they no longer support
>}}}in their product line?
>}}
>}}If i were writing a _new_ OS, i'd agree that that would be a Dumb Idea. But
>}}there happens to be millions of existing Macs out there with lots of software.
>}
>}Well, that depends on how literally the emulate the 68020, and if it wouldn't
>}be better to emulate the 68030.
>
> They don't really need to. If I recall, the only real difference
>between the 020 and the 030 is the PMMU is built into the 030. Motorola's
>chip designations are that even numbers are major increases, odd numbers are
>minor upgrades. You don't hear about the 68010. (Although the 68060 isn't
>as bing a leap over the 040 as the 040 was over the 030). There may be
>other differences, but I don't thinky they will be too significant.
True, there are only slight differences between o20 and 030, and they
probably wouldn't affect an emulator.
The 68010 was the 68k family member that could do VM/demand paging.
>}}Now, do you want to know a _really_ Dumb Idea? Produce a new personal
>}}computer running a brand new computer chip and a new OS and don't have any
>}}application software to run on it at introduction (let alone thousands of
>}}software titles). Apple engineers are not that dumb. Even Apple managers aren't
>}}that dumb. :-)
>
> It's not necessarily dumb. Having a sub-feature that's backwards
>compatibility is nice these days, but is not required per-se. Witness
>NeXTstep for an example, although they are going to have some sort of
>DOS/Windoz function on NeXTstep 486 (For those who bought the wrong computer
>in the first place, and are regretting their decision :)
But then DOS emulation is available for SVR3 and SVR4.
>}Which machine is that? Alpha? Between OpenVMS and UNIX they have plenty of
>}apps.
>}
>}DEC is only planning to sell NT on one low-end model.
>}
>}}Some of us do have a clue, even if the rest of the world hasn't figured that
>}}out yet.
>}
>}When the Mac ships with a real command line shell, then maybe some people
>}will look on it more favorably.
>
> They do, it's called A/UX. And it is something that they seem to be
>letting languish at the sideline. Apple today could release something that
>is 95% of what talegent promisses to be if instead, two years ago, they
>built something GOOD on A/UX, and started making it multi-platform. Also
>make a decent development environment (C++ or Objective-C, a solid interface
>builder and debugger. Hey, just hack GCC for the compiler).
The problem is that Apple hasn't put enough into the MacOS emulation for
A/UX.
> The biggest uglyness that I see with NT and Taligent is the emulator
>approach. Both promise to be multi-platform, but they both emulate a chip
>for cross computer work. I think the fat binary concept (the application
>wrapper has binaries for all different computers, and just uses the one
>appropriate for the job. Of course, make it strippable), works better
>because of the performance bottleneck from emulation. This requires
>slightly more work for the developer. (He has to go somewhere to compile on
>the other architectures, but that is simply the few hours it takes to
>compile soemthing), and a slight lag when a new architecture is announced
>for the OS, but the end user benefits from better performance. Emulation
>should only be used for backwards compatability to a previous
>OS/architecture, such as System 6*/680x0 software for an Apple RISC machine,
>although it is better to just make cross compilation painless in the long
>run.
>
> However, this does also complicate the job for the OS manufacturer,
>dependong on how much the manufacturer is relying on the emulation to run
>his GUI/OS if the manufacturer is going the emulation route.
Microsoft is extremely in control of ports of NT. There are very few
source licenses for NT out there.
CP/M lives!
>
> I can still hack on the 11 quite easily. (My definition of hack is
> that a simple basic or fortran program can directly talk to the
> mag-tape driver to tell it to write an eof or do a backspace, or
> can stuff a command line buffer and execute any system cusp.)
My definition of hack usually involves capturing interrupts, which is
impossible from user programs on a VAX. Long live small computers and
small operating systems!
Tim Pierce
>In article <921216...@rmkhome.UUCP> r...@rmkhome.UUCP (Rick Kelly) writes:
>
>>When the Mac ships with a real command line shell, then maybe some people
>>will look on it more favorably.
>
>Ha-ha-ha!!! You make a funny, no?
No.
>... And I have better things to
>do than spend time trying to convince you otherwise or start a new flame war.
Then take some free advice and don't try to do either, since you're
doing a miserable job.
When the Mac ships with a real command line shell, then I will look on
it more favorably. QED.
--
____ Tim Pierce /
\ / twpi...@unix.amherst.edu / Rocks say goodbye.
\/ (BITnet: TWPIERCE@AMHERST) /
Michael T Pins
>Nicholas C. Weaver said to All:
-NC> From: nwe...@soda.berkeley.edu (Nicholas C. Weaver)
-NC> example, try moving all files starting with Let to the directory
-NC> Letters. How do you do this easily in a GUI? A CLI for some purposes
-NC> is superior, because of it's higher level of abstraction.
>Actually, I just had to do a 26-letter split of several thousand files, and did
>it just fine on a GUI (Macintosh System 7, but System 6 or 4.2 would have
>worked
>okay, also). FYI, in case your question was a serious challenge -- I defined
>26
>folders starting with the right letter (A Folder, B Folder, etc.), and then
>told
>the system to re-organize the folder by name, using the iconic view. That gave
>me a list about five icons wide, with a given folder followed by all the files
>starting with the same letter. Then I just did a lot (and admittedly, it was a
>LOT) of moving. Because it was a GUI, I could easily select multiple files,
>though, and it wasn't too hard to grab a few dozen at a time.
>It took a while, and I would rather have done it with a CLI. But I didn't have
>to do N-thousand individual moves, and it only took me fifteen or twenty
>minutes
>for the moves. That timing is a precise geometric mean between fast enough and
>not fast enough, by the way.
I just wrote a shell script to do the same thing.
Total time: less than a minute.
And of course, with a multitasking machine you start the shell script and go
onto other things while it's doing it's thing.
Don Stokes
> >You're saying DEC is having trouble today because they killed the -10?
> >
>
> More importantly, DEC is a self-destructive company. IBM has *never* killed
> off anything, and I believe it was about a year ago that the last of the
> 704 or something really old machines was retired by the user so that ended an
> era, not IBM's unwillingness to support it if the user community paid a decent
> amount for the support.
DEC did not stop supporting existing -10s, although they did encourage
users to move to other things (mainly by making maintenance of the old
iron too expensive, a standard trick throughout the industry).
And I wouldn't crow too much about IBM -- ever heard of the System/36?
Yes, there are a lot of 'em out there. That architecture is dead; the
AS/400 is a development of the System/38.
> Whether the -10 would have made any specific difference is not the point: DEC
> made it clear that the VAX was *THE* one and and only way to go, and any other
> project would get very little support. The inability for something as inept
> as the VAXmate to evolve properly is additional evidence of this. How much
> futzing around with a mundane product can one company do. The dumb thing was
> at best a poor PC assuming it even ever worked, yet it never fully did, thus
> deepening DEC's woes in that department.
DEC have done very badly in the "PC" market. We have (in roughly
chronological order):
VT78 Small system PDP-8
PDT-11/110 LSI11 in VT100
PDT-11/130 LSI11 in VT100 with TU58 cartridge tapes
PDT-11/150 LSI11 in box with one or two 8" floppies
PDT11-line all marketed as "intelligent terminals"
DECmate I Wordprocessor based on single chip "PDP-8"
Robin (VT180) CP/M in a VT100, probably too expensive
DECmate II Good machine, marketed as WP (needs CP/M copro
to be genuinely useful) (Intersil 61x0 based)
Rainbow CP/M & CP/M-86 box, retrofitted to run MS-DOS, Not
PC compatible when PCklones became de-facto standard)
Pro/350 F-11 chip, let down by s/w
DECmate III Small box DECmate, shares many characteristics with
DECmate II, but not parts (Intersil 6120)!
Pro/380 Faster 350 (J-11 chip)
VAXmate PCklone, expensive, poorly built, limited expansion.
Just oddball enough to be a problem.
DECmate IIIplus III with hard disk
Personally, I think the DECmate II & III[plus] were the only ones of the
above to hit the mark, with the Rainbow a close third (to be fair, it wasn't
clear at the time how the market would go, and DEC seemed to be covering
the bases by having a Z80 to maintain compatibility with old CP/M-80 code
as well as an 8088 to run 16 bit code under CP/M-86; it was a good machine,
well built and competitive with the IBM PC, but stomped on heavily when the
klones hit).
The DECmate II & III were intended as a wordprocessors (under WPS-8), but
could take a "CP/M" board, which made them much more useful. The II
could take an 8086 expansion and run MS-DOS (but not with any measure
of PC combatibility). (The III is a small box, with one 5.25" full
height drive bay; the II has two drive bays and is about the size of a
larg box PC.) In these parts, DECmates made an incredible penetration
into the market.
But really, DEC never had the heart to market their machines as any kind of
general purpose machine; they always pushed them into existing customers
as adjuncts to their bigger systems, or as special purpose boxes. I knew
of a few sites that used PDT-11/150s as personal computers anyway.
> Successful companies make *many* products, and divisions don't backstab each
> other. The only "product" you could ascribe the word "many" to at DEC is
> the "product" called "managers".
A universal problem, alas. Name a large computer company that doesn't have
some kind of competition between development groups.
Peter da Silva
> I just wrote a shell script to do the same thing.
Wimp: "for i in a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z; do
mv $i?* $i/.; done &". Total time, 20 seconds. I don't have to wait for it
to finish, I did it in the background.
Kimo B. Yap
equiv. to 2^34 - 2^35 "bytes" (using 8 bit byte terminology). That's more
than the vax. Half of that is user space, same as the VAX.-kby
Charles Lasner
>
>(Note--I was born 20 years too late to have been a PDP-8 hacker. I'm just a
>Charles J. Lasner wanna-be.)
*Real* PDP-8's are currently available in various forms. You have to do some
of your own maintainence and scrounging, and there is a reasonably "network"
of experts on the hardware side of things. All it takes is some "sweat" to
have one.
For wimpier people, there are emulators, but in any case, they are available.
For revisionist types, there are DECmates, but no front panels possible. (An
emulator may have a graphical interface that emulates the original front
panel switches, etc.)
Read alt.sys.pdp8 for more details.
cjl
Bill Bogstad
>che...@gallant.apple.com (Cheryl Lins) writes:
>
>chip and new OS and no S/W" bit is _exactly_ what Apple did when they
>introduced the Mac in the first place when they already had a thriving
>platform out there. Based on my experiences with Apple, I could easily seem
>doing the same thing again... Just my $.03
Actually, that is what they did with the Appple III which failed.
Then the Lisa which also failed. Finally, they came out with the Mac and
retrofitted its software to run on the Lisa. The Mac succeeded, but it was
definitely not clear for sometime that it would. I seem to recall that the
original Macs came with 128K of RAM and were kind of pathetic. I think
people did development and testing of software on the retrofitted Lisa
platform. This record would not appear to encourage "clean slate"
development of products.
Bill Bogstad
P.S. And then there is the II GS, I would guess a moderate sucess; but I
haven't paid attention to that market in a long time.
Charles Lasner
>
>A comma following a symbol defines that symbol as the current location
>counter; a slash following an expression changes the location counter
perhaps a star? (asterisk)?
>to the value of the expression. The current location counter is
>referenced with a period, and a string beginning with a slash is a comment.
cjl
Hugh J.E. Davies
>In article <1992Dec16.0...@netsys.com> bu...@netsys.com (Mark Hittinger) writes:
>> Oh well - I'll just ask him when he thinks he can port WNT to the 11!
>
>Why in the world would you want to port WNT to *anything*? Bad enough that
>it exists in the first place.
>--
>Peter da Silva. <pe...@sugar.neosoft.com>.
> 'U`
>Tarjoilija, t dm d ateria el d d viel d.
If Dave Cutler's leading the development team, it can't be *all* bad.
---
Regards,
Hugh.
------------------------------------------------------------------
I don't speak for Xerox, nor they for me.
Rank Xerox European Systems Centre, Welwyn Garden City, Herts., UK.
Mail to; Huge...@rx.xerox.com, whatever it says in the header.
Don Stokes
> True, but IBM didn't make those 704 users pay so much that they curled up
> and died for well over 20 years.
Uh, but IBM users are *used* to paying big maintenance bills!
> As far as I'm concerned, System 3 never was a viable product, and its
> followons 32, 34, 36, 38, 36-revisited, AS-400 are as miserable. But that's
> besides the point. IBM isn't telling existing customers to chuck them by
> manipulating them into a newer product by the extortive technique of telling
> them they are officially obsoleting the product. On the contrary, they kept
> stringing along customers claiming that actual software was going to be
> producted for these turkeys.
Ummm, making it clear to all the /36 customers that their machine isn't
going anywhere and they'll have to migrate to an AS/400 (or another vendor)
to upgrade their hardware comes pretty close. It looks to me like Jupiter
all over again.
> > Robin (VT180) CP/M in a VT100, probably too expensive
>
> Another stopgap; the VT-180 was a retrofit for existing VT-100 boxes; DEC
> got caught up into that obligatory market where you just had to have a
> *something* that ran CP/M. Having a minimal peripheral set made it a toy
> even by CP/M standards.
I don't know what DEC charged for it, but it doesn't seem a lot different
to most of the CP/M boxes of the day.
I forgot to mention the VT103 -- an LSI 11/2 processor and LSI-11 bus
backplane in a VT100. Nice idea, again didn't go far. I heard of someone
rewiring the bus and putting a KA630 and memory in there.... VAX in a VT.
> > Pro/350 F-11 chip, let down by s/w
>
> No, let down by itself. It's not compatible with certain key requirements of
> existing -11 software. It caused wasted efforts to attempt to make the
> prevailing -11 software be compatible with its incompatibilities, and was
> only partially successful and at great expense. The incompatiblity could've
> easily been avoided. Same for DECmates. Moral: don't let Harris Semiconductor
> design the software configuration of your hardware you farm out the design
> of to them.
DEC should have put RSX on these boxes, not a crippled version. The pdp11
hackers who tried to use them got quickly frustrated by the nearly-RSX-but-
not-quite-ness of P/OS. RSX is good enough that you don't need to program
on the bare metal to get anything done. Serious pdp11 hackers ran RT11 on
them. Later came the Pro/325, which was only good for running RT11.
I don't think DEC really knew what they were going to do with these boxes
when they were designed. At the time I got the impression DEC left the
customer to figure out what to do with them.
> > DECmate III Small box DECmate, shares many characteristics with
> > DECmate II, but not parts (Intersil 6120)!
>
> This was a partial VLSI treatment of the DM II to get the whole thing smaller.
Not a bad size either. That probably accounted a lot for the popularity
of the things; the system box sits neatly under the monitor with very little
waste space. I rather like them, even if Charles doesn't. 8-)
> > Pro/380 Faster 350 (J-11 chip)
>
> Better, but still "tainted" by the Pro/325 and 350.
Still had the same software problems. It was a bit faster, but lacking
cache, so nowhere near as fast as other J11 systems.
> The III is the "toy" model and comes with only two floppies and no upgrade
> possible, while the II has 2 floppies and optionally more floppies or a
> hard disk.
Gee Charles, so what did you do with the III -> III+ upgrade "kit" I sent
you?
(Admittedly, the "upgrade" does consist of chucking out everything that
makes it a III and replacing it with III+ parts. You get to keep the
box. Maybe the power supply too, but it should really be replaced with
a bigger one. 8-)
IIIs & III+s were very popular here. I got mine off a pile of 40-odd of
'em that were being disposed of (after DG did a better selling job into a
certain Govt Dept than DEC did) -- I got in early, people getting in afterward
found the price had gone up a lot.... (It seems I managed to pick the only
one in the pile with an APU (CP/M) board too....)
Seth the Lesser
>sl...@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu (Seth "the Lesser") writes:
>
>[responding to a comment on the PDP-1 assembler as an origin for the
> syntax of the assemblers for later PDP-xx systems]
>
>>As anyone knows who used PAL-8, PAL-III, MACRO-8, etc. on the PDP-8. (Comma
>>for tags, slash for comments, the letter `I' for indirection, etc.)
>
> (gee, I wonder why that is?) deleted]
What did MACRO use for literals? Or did it have any such concept?
(Note--I was born 20 years too late to have been a PDP-8 hacker. I'm just a
Charles J. Lasner wanna-be.)
Seth L. Blumberg \ Warning: This posting has been determined to cause
sl...@columbia.edu (play) \ cancer in laboratory animals. Please make sure
se...@ctr.columbia.edu (work) \ that no white mice are allowed to read it.
> No one I know shares my opinions, least of all Columbia University. <