[rescue] newest rescue

Wed Feb 3 12:12:08 CST 2016

Hi, and thanks for the critique...yea, 'toys' may have been a bit harsh and
a little inaccurate....'castrated' may have been better.   So....
"The SE/30 was also a great machine because it was a 68030 (so integrated
PMMU) with a 68882 FPU and a 32-bit PDS slot that could take a variety of
expansion cards and accelerators as well (color video cards, networking
cards, CPU accelerators, etc.)  It could also take a maximum of 128MB of
RAM. And if you can track down an early era IIsi, it's 32-bit clean ROM is
on a card and can be swapped into an SE/30 to make it 32-bit clean. In my
experience both the IIci and SE/30 ran NetBSD well."

Can you elaborate on this a bit? (not to hijack this thread). You are
saying to get full 32 bit address space I need to get the 32bit enabled
ROM?  I thought the address li nes were not even there?
Can one still get NetBSD for the SE30?
Am interested as sometime in the future am considering setting up a MOF
server to install an OS on some bare metal VAXes I have.  In any event,
just having the SE30 fired up again would be cool.
Thanks
J

On Wed, Feb 3, 2016 at 11:59 AM, Nathan Raymond <nraymond at gmail.com> wrote:

> Thanks for the info everyone, I have a better sense of the 680x0 Suns now!
>
> John, regarding the Macs of that era, I wouldn't say Apple was making
> 'toys', but they had some issues around their software stack and legacy
> support issues. When I got into 680x0 Macs, Apple had 24-bit color with
> multiple monitor support and arbitrary resolutions and arrangements, 32-bit
> addressing, multitasking (though only cooperative) and virtual memory. FPUs
> were actually standard in Macs for a long time, starting with the Mac II,
> and only started to be omitted much later when Apple made more of a
> consumer push with the LC and IIsi line and started to do cost cutting. You
> may be thinking of the fact that the Mac II included Apple's MMU in the MMU
> socket rather than the Motorola PMMU, and Apple's MMU didn't support
> virtual memory, so you'd have to replace it and upgrade the ROM to use
> virtual memory in later OS releases. While Apple didn't initially include
> TCP/IP with their OS, it was part of System 6 starting in 1988 and later on
> Apple added TCP/IP support to their filesharing with AppleShare IP.
>
> RAM was very expensive back then so while in hindsight it was a mistake to
> release computers with 32-bit processors but only do 24-bit addressing on
> them, I can understand why it happened. The IIci was when Apple cleaned up
> the architecture, being the first Mac with a 32-bit clean ROM. With it's
> support of up to 128MB of RAM, three NuBus expansion slots, and a PDS
> expansion slot that came with an L2 cache card for the processor and could
> be used for any number of upgrades (I have a 50Mhz 68030 accelerator in
> mine right now), it was a very capable machine. Expansion card options
> included 100Base-T ethernet, video cards, DSPs, sound cards, and of course
> the MacIvory Lisp Machine. There was even a version of the IIci that Apple
> made for the government/military which took ECC RAM.
>
> The SE/30 was also a great machine because it was a 68030 (so integrated
> PMMU) with a 68882 FPU and a 32-bit PDS slot that could take a variety of
> expansion cards and accelerators as well (color video cards, networking
> cards, CPU accelerators, etc.)  It could also take a maximum of 128MB of
> RAM. And if you can track down an early era IIsi, it's 32-bit clean ROM is
> on a card and can be swapped into an SE/30 to make it 32-bit clean. In my
> experience both the IIci and SE/30 ran NetBSD well.
>
> The IIfx was great because not only was it a 40Mhz '030, but lots of
> co-processors for I/O and under AU/X had full DMA support to offload most
> of the I/O. Unfortunately nobody has ever supported all the IIfx DMA under
> NetBSD, so it's really just a good AU/X machine. My understanding is that
> there was a lot of AU/X at NASA at one point.
>
> NeXT hardware was great because it was like the IIfx but better, with every
> NeXT having a Motorola DSP co-processor and a cube with the NeXTDimension
> video card being an amazing device with terrific video in and out
> capabilities and capable of offloading the Display PostScript work from the
> rest of the system. And while I've never seen a comprehensive comparison of
> AU/X against NeXTSTEP from that era, I think NeXTSTEP would come out on
> top, not least of which because of it's good development environment.
>
> It'd be fun to set up a 68030 Sun, Mac IIfx running AU/X, and NeXT Cube up
> and see how they'd all do in a variety of tasks!
>
> On Tue, Feb 2, 2016 at 8:28 PM, John Hudak <jjhudak at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > 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/
> > >> > > _______________________________________________
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