[rescue] newest rescue

Tue Feb 2 19:28:35 CST 2016

As an addendum to my own post, in comparison to Sun, Apple had used the
680xx cpus but, in comparison, they were making 'toys'...I  think the SE30
was a really sweet machine as it was but apple castrated it with no FPU,
limited memory space, and adherence to apple talk (which was never going to
power the internet). ...It was their answer to DECs PDT, effectively a word
processing station (which was amazing at that task, just sucked as a
general purpose machine).
Also, I saw a lot of Suns displace VAXes and MVAXes in my university
setting.  Too bad there isn't a similar hw/sw 'revolution' going on
now.....those were fun days.

On Tue, Feb 2, 2016 at 8:18 PM, John Hudak <jjhudak at gmail.com> wrote:

> well, to echo a point already made, the whole package. The 68030 cpu was,
> as a CISC architecture, very good. It was analogous to the PDP11 CPU hw
> architecture at the time. It had an orthogonal ISA, instruction composition
> and decoding 'made sense' at the assembly language level, and Mot has a
> very nice set of complimentary support chips that could make a 680xx
> machine with a low chip count.  Sun was in transition from a lot of 74xx
> 'glue logic' to PALs and even custom ASICs....IIRC the MMU for that machine
> was Suns own design heavily influenced by Unix. It was clean (not anywhere
> as convoluted as DECs MMU approach with the VAX, and was relatively fast.
> Bill Joy did wonders in crafting UNIX for that machine.  I always thought
> that Sun lost the real prize in dragging their feel (e.g. not committing
> resources) to promoting a *really good* version of Unix and the networking
> support- their slogan at one time was "The network is the computer
> (machine?)" I believe if Sun dumped more resources into the OS and network
> marketing, there would have been no Linux.
> Sun had an excellent network view of the world and Unix, much better than
> DECs view and definitely ahead of DEC in the UNIX world, but they ran into
> the same enemy - the PEEE CEEE. - cheaper, a lot less powerful, full of
> design holes and a very bad imitation of CMP and taught the world the value
> of the three-finger salute and that print queues would be invented by MS
> some 20 yrs later. (eventhough DEC had be doing multi tasking since mid
> 1960s and it was a built in standard with Unix almost since its
> inception-definitely since V6. Oh well a digression..
> The SPARC architecture was Suns answer to the RISC architecture camps, and
> it was a fairly good one.  In fact, the T1 and T2 hw architectures are
> regularly cited and taught in EE/CS grad courses, and one can get the IP
> for Xilinx FPGAs to emulate a T1, or multi-core T!s.  Anyway, a lot of
> wonderful history.
> Enjoy
>
> John
>
>
> On Tue, Feb 2, 2016 at 5:19 PM, Nathan Raymond <nraymond at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> So here I guess I show my (relative) youth, having never used a 680x0 Sun
>> workstation (just SPARC stuff), what's the draw, exactly? At that time I
>> was excited by the Mac IIfx and AU/X and the NeXT computers, both of which
>> struck me as advanced machines from a VLSI design perspective. From the
>> photos I've seen of Sun 680x0 workstations, their motherboards have what
>> look like an insane number of chips (surely not 74-series logic?) which at
>> first blush looks primitive to me. What am I missing? Or is it the
>> software
>> they ran in that era?
>>
>> On Tue, Feb 2, 2016 at 5:05 PM, John Hudak <jjhudak at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > OMG, nice snag....We had a bunch of those in our lab...brings back nice
>> > memories.  Congrats and pics after bootup pls...
>> >
>> > Much jealous and envy...
>> > -J
>> >
>> >
>> > On Tue, Feb 2, 2016 at 1:51 PM, Walter Belgers <
>> walter+rescue at belgers.com>
>> > wrote:
>> >
>> > > Hi all,
>> > >
>> > > I just broke a promise to my wife (and myself). I promised to collect
>> > Suns
>> > > no
>> > > bigger than then SparcCenter 1000. But when you come across a 3/470,
>> how
>> > > can
>> > > you not rescue it from the garbage heap?
>> > >
>> > > It has a 501 1550 CPU board with a 501 1532 cg6 framebuffer (quite
>> > special
>> > > I
>> > > guess - it also comes with keyboard, mouse and colour monitor). There
>> s a
>> > > 501
>> > > 1217 SCSI controller, a 501 1102 RAM board (8MB) and a board marked
>> > > DATARAM .
>> > > Is this a memory caching board? It has a bunch of LEDs on it.
>> > >
>> > > The system supposedly does not boot up (haven t tried yet). The boards
>> > have
>> > > been pulled out and put back again, not necessarily in the same slot.
>> Is
>> > > there
>> > > something I need to know about slot locations for these board? I
>> vaguely
>> > > remember some quirks with other Suns in this respect.
>> > >
>> > > Cheers,
>> > > Walter.
>> > > --
>> > > Walter Belgers
>> > > walter at belge.rs -=- http://belge.rs/
>> > > _______________________________________________
>> > > rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue
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