[SunRescue] Re: [Packrats] HAL Computer (Fujitsu?)

[James Lockwood]

On Wed, 17 May 2000, Mike Nicewonger wrote:

> Hi All,
> 
> I was at one of my favorite used computer dealers the other day and saw an
> odd box, said HAL series 300 on it, best info I can find says it is some
> kind of SPARC. What is it? It has S-Bus slots. What does it run for OS?
> Experiences, opinions?

Neat box.  HAL was originally independant and eventually became an
autonomous division of Fujitsu. The HALstations were the first 64-bit
SPARC machines ever produced, but since they predated the UltraSparc
(sparcv9) HAL extended sparcv8 in different ways. No VIS, etc.  Their chip
design was known as SPARC64.  They ran a modified version of Solaris 2.4
(called HalOS) originally, I believe that HAL went as far as 2.5.1 for
the SPARC64 machines.  Normal Solaris will not run on these systems, HalOS
was full 64-bit from the start and beat Sun to the punch in this by nearly
4 years. 

The 300 was the original line, circa 1995.  The 330 was a 100MHz SPARC64
box, the 350 was 118MHz.  Both had a split 128/128 I/D L1 cache and no L2
cache.

Scott Metcalf, the former CEO of HAL, is now CEO of the company I work
for.  Great guy.

-James