[rescue] newest rescue

[John Hudak]

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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