Message-ID: <3C50D828.C00036AF@gazonk.del> From: "Foobar T. Clown" X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (Win98; I) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,alt.sys.perq Subject: PERQ computers (Was: First DESKTOP Unix Box?) References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Lines: 124 X-Trace: /wh32ykG2OexzY30qRrvWEDFtWtz0L0xFeiRx+nLl8fPSJ2ZfWOmY8pxFAgOFUR4onphPQpovaU+!lr9zSeSs48PrVwJ+iBN4ZqKG2H4kPRpaBsvWNtsJsUkN1Hn862GhU9apUDG0TwCdvd4I X-Complaints-To: abuse@gtei.net X-Abuse-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2002 03:58:24 GMT Distribution: world Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2002 03:58:33 GMT Path: chonsp.franklin.ch!pfaff.ethz.ch!news-zh.switch.ch!news-ge.switch.ch!news.maxwell.syr.edu!news.he.net!cyclone-sf.pbi.net!131.119.28.146!paloalto-snh1.gtei.net!news.gtei.net!paloalto-snr2.gtei.net.POSTED!not-for-mail Xref: chonsp.franklin.ch alt.folklore.computers:99679 Christopher Stacy wrote: > > [...] Simon Bowring ("Simon") writes: > Simon> Sorry if this is a FAQ.... What was the very first > commercially available DESKTOP Unix box? > > Three Rivers Corporation's PERQ was out in 1980 or 81, [...] It had > a bitmapped display, mouse, network, and 68000 based processor > running some kind of UNIX. It was a CMU thing. All true, except that it didn't use a 68000, and it didn't run UNIX (at least, not to begin with), and it wasn't exactly a C-MU thing. Three Rivers Computer Corporation was located about a mile and a half from the C-MU campus. It was founded by C-MU alumni, but AFAIK, none of them was employed by the university at the time. The PERQ work- station was designed to meet the requirements of an RFP published by the C-MU computer science department, but the work was all done off- campus. I kind of recall that C-MU only reluctantly bought PERQs. They had no choice, really -- no one else responded to their RFP. There were two processors in the original PERQ I workstation; the main processor and the I/O processor. The I/O processor was a Z80, and it handled disk requests, two RS-232 ports, the keyboard, the mouse, and a GPIB bus. The I/O processor and all of its peripheral interfaces occupied one slot in the backplane (circuit boards were approximately 18 inches by maybe 12 inches.) The original I/O board was quickly replaced by one which also contained a three megabit ethernet interface. IIRC, the so-called EIO board was a ten layer circuit board (ugly). One whole backplane slot was filled with memory chips -- 256 K WORDS in the first model, quickly replaced by a 512K word board and then a one megaword board. Words were 16 bits, and the memory was *NOT* byte addressable. The main CPU occupied another whole backplane slot all by itself. It was built mostly from 74LSxxx TTL. There was one LSI part: A micro- sequencer which (I think) was made by AMD, and there was a whole bunch of 70nS static RAM for the control store. The control store was writable. It was orgainized as 4K words with some really weird number of bits per word (numbers like 34 and 28 and 19 keep popping into my head). A later model expanded the control store to 16 K words. There was some kind of interface which allowed the Z80 on the I/O processor to write to the control store at boot time, but there was also an interface which allowed the CPU to re-write its own microinstructions. I personally know of two different instruction sets that were implemented in microcode. The first one to be used was called the Q- code instruction set. It was more or less a straightforward implemen- tation of the UCSD P-Code virtual machine. (Most PERQ software was written in Pascal, and compiled with the UCSD compiler.) The other one I know of was the C-MU SPICE Lisp instruction set. There may have been a third, but more on that below. There were three operating systems used on PERQs that I know of. (No, I am not counting Aaron Wohl's port of CPM because that ran entirely on the Z80, and it didn't use the main CPU at all.) The first OS -- called POS -- was written by Three Rivers. "POS" stood for "Piece Of Shit." It was written for a demo, and it was never intended to be sold as a product. The company's founders -- I swear to God, I am NOT making this up -- expected to sell computers with *NO* operating system. They were prepared to sell and support the micro-assembler; the Pascal microcode, libraries, and compiler; and they expected to sell and support the bootstrap loader. Everything else was supposed to be up to the customer. Nobody below the top level of management was surprised when POS was added to the product catalog, and the definition of "POS" was changed to "Perq Operating System." The second OS was Accent. Accent probably was the coolest OS ever. Let me say that again, it's important. Accent was the COOLEST OS *EVER* devised by Man!!!! Well, it wasn't "Man" so much as it was Rick Rashid -- a research asso- ciate at C-MU (IIRC) -- and a handful of other C-MU folk. Accent was such a great idea that when C-MU abandoned the PERQs, they ported it to other hardware and called it "Mach." Mach was licensed by NeXT computer corp, and became the core of NeXTStep, and that was eventually purchased by Apple computer where it has mutated into Mac OS X. While much of that was happening, Rick Rashid accepted a top-level engineering job at a large and famous software house, where he put most of the best ideas from Mach (and a whole lot of compromises) into an entirely new operating system called Windows NT. The third OS was called QNX, and it came out of ICL Ltd. in England. I have never seen a PERQ running QNX, but I understand it to be a port of something called PNX which I understand was somewhat like UNIX. AFAIK, the PNX source code was written in the C programming language. I do not know whether the ICL folk wrote their own microcode, or whether they wrote a C compiler that targeted the Q-code instruction set. ICL entered the picture when C-MU dropped out, and Three Rivers (by then called "PERQ Systems, Inc.") sought out another large customer to pay the bills. Some time after, PERQ Systems ceased operations as the result of a business deal between themselves and a third company. ICL went on to develop something called the Perq 3B (Perq II was just a new skin wrapped around the same old circuit boards), while the third company completed the design of what would have been the Perq 3A except they named it something else. I know nothing of the Perq 3B, but the Perq 3A was, TA DA!, A 68020 machine running real, honest-to-God, AT&T UNIX. (It was intended to be a whole lot more than that, but that's another story.) The Perq 3A was never sold *AS* a product, but rather, it was sold *IN* a product -- a computerized typesetting and photo-lithography system that sold for several millions of dollars a pop. > PERQ was later than the MIT Lisp Machine (which was a very high-end > system, and the first commercially available bitmap-mouse-network > thing, but which was not a desktop and not a UNIX) [...] I've never seen a MIT lisp machine, but I've seen a Symbolics machine -- pretty much the same thing. It was six feet tall, weighed several hundred pounds (not counting the separate, floor-standing disk drive), and it had special power and air conditioning requirements. It *WAS* a personal computer -- only one person could use it at one time -- but it sure as hell was no DESKTOP personal computer. -- Foo! ###### Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers From: Christopher Stacy Subject: Re: PERQ computers (Was: First DESKTOP Unix Box?) Message-ID: Sender: cstacy@BONK Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2002 06:04:14 GMT References: <3C50D828.C00036AF@gazonk.del> NNTP-Posting-Host: ppp0c019.std.com Organization: The World @ Software Tool & Die X-Newsreader: Gnus v5.7/Emacs 20.7 Lines: 22 Path: chonsp.franklin.ch!pfaff.ethz.ch!news-zh.switch.ch!news-ge.switch.ch!news-fra1.dfn.de!fu-berlin.de!newsfeed.arcor-online.net!fr.clara.net!heighliner.fr.clara.net!news-hub.siol.net!zur.uu.net!ash.uu.net!world!news Xref: chonsp.franklin.ch alt.folklore.computers:99714 [alt.sys.perq removed] >>>>> On Fri, 25 Jan 2002 03:58:33 GMT, Foobar T Clown ("Foobar") writes: Foobar> I've never seen a MIT lisp machine, but I've seen a Symbolics machine -- Foobar> pretty much the same thing. It was six feet tall, weighed several Foobar> hundred pounds (not counting the separate, floor-standing disk drive), Foobar> and it had special power and air conditioning requirements. It *WAS* a Foobar> personal computer -- only one person could use it at one time -- but it Foobar> sure as hell was no DESKTOP personal computer. Right: only the user's console sat on the desktop. The machine was located at the end of the console cables, in an air-conditioned machine room. I am pretty sure it was the first computer that was commercially available with a bitmapped display, mouse, network, and of course local disk. It features a large address space, several (36 bit) megawords of memory, and an 80-300 MB hard drive. The CPU was a microcoded stack machine that implemented Lisp, which the entire operating system and all applications were written in. (Later versions of the Lisp Machine were, of course, even more powerful.) ###### From: Jim Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,alt.sys.perq Subject: Re: PERQ computers (Was: First DESKTOP Unix Box?) Date: 25 Jan 2002 12:27:07 -0600 Lines: 76 Distribution: world Message-ID: <250120021325582088%eduorg@com.net> References: <3C50D828.C00036AF@gazonk.del> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-transfer-encoding: 8bit User-Agent: Thoth/1.4.2 (Carbon/OS X) Path: chonsp.franklin.ch!pfaff.ethz.ch!news-zh.switch.ch!news-ge.switch.ch!news.maxwell.syr.edu!newsfeed.novia.net.MISMATCH!novia!novia!sequencer.newscene.com!not-for-mail Xref: chonsp.franklin.ch alt.folklore.computers:99688 In article <3C50D828.C00036AF@gazonk.del>, Foobar T. Clown wrote: > Three Rivers Computer Corporation was located about a mile and a half > from the C-MU campus. It was founded by C-MU alumni, but AFAIK, none > of them was employed by the university at the time. The PERQ work- > station was designed to meet the requirements of an RFP published by > the C-MU computer science department, but the work was all done off- > campus. I kind of recall that C-MU only reluctantly bought PERQs. They > had no choice, really -- no one else responded to their RFP. > There were three operating systems used on PERQs that I know of. (No, > I am not counting Aaron Wohl's port of CPM because that ran entirely on > the Z80, and it didn't use the main CPU at all.) The first OS -- called > POS -- was written by Three Rivers. "POS" stood for "Piece Of Shit." > It was written for a demo, and it was never intended to be sold as a > product. The company's founders -- I swear to God, I am NOT making this > up -- expected to sell computers with *NO* operating system. They were > prepared to sell and support the micro-assembler; the Pascal microcode, > libraries, and compiler; and they expected to sell and support the > bootstrap loader. Everything else was supposed to be up to the > customer. Nobody below the top level of management was surprised when > POS was added to the product catalog, and the definition of "POS" was > changed to "Perq Operating System." > > The second OS was Accent. Accent probably was the coolest OS ever. > > Let me say that again, it's important. > > Accent was the COOLEST OS *EVER* devised by Man!!!! Thanks for the PERQ history. I used a PERQ system in the1982 to 1985 timeframe. It was a large brownish box, actually built into the desk. I think it used 8 inch floppies, and had what looked like a 14 inch hard drive. I also remember InTran (or possibly Three Rivers - it's been a long time!) sending us replacement boards when there was a hardware failure, and I remember replacing the I/O board with the Z80 on it, and the hard drive controller board. It was OEMed by InTran, the company we got the machine from. It was a graphics workstation, connected via ethernet to a Xerox 9700 laser printer. We used it to create fonts and electronic forms for the printer, bypassing the functional but extremely time consuming FDL language on the printer. I've been trying to identify the model of this machine and the OS that it used for some time. It had a 4 button "puck" as the mouse, that you had to use on the graphics tablet. Each button was a different color - red, green, blue and yellow as I recall. The software we used was mainly InTran's stuff, used to actually create forms and fonts for the Xerox printer. However, I do remember using the "shell" command from a menu that put you at a command prompt. I also remember a disk utility called "Scavenger", that was probably a defragger of some kind. While it was running, the "progress indicator" was a bird flying up and down the screen. It also had a good chess game, and a rather outstanding pool game! This thing was quite incredible in it's time. The InTran software was all menu driven, point and click, with an ethernet connection to the Xerox 9700 printer. This printer, BTW, was at the time the fastest cut sheet laser printer in the world - 2 pages per second (120 ppm) - continuously. I ran these things for several years. Does any of this ring any bells? Is this enough info for you (or anyone else) to identify this PERQ and the OS it used? Ahhhhh, memories....... Jim ###### From: jmfbahciv@aol.com Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,alt.sys.perq Subject: Re: PERQ computers (Was: First DESKTOP Unix Box?) Date: Sat, 26 Jan 02 11:53:53 GMT Organization: UltraNet Communications, Inc. Lines: 15 Message-ID: References: <3C50D828.C00036AF@gazonk.del> <250120021325582088%eduorg@com.net> <3C52069F.8A8E9C19@gazonk.del> X-Trace: UmFuZG9tSVZy23jTRM70ZODmp5vFUA1I4FfMcHKf8XInVtlkUUa3cBS5yzdloDGb X-Complaints-To: abuse@rcn.com NNTP-Posting-Date: 26 Jan 2002 14:04:43 GMT X-Newsreader: News Xpress Version 1.0 Beta #4 Path: chonsp.franklin.ch!pfaff.ethz.ch!news-zh.switch.ch!57535!news.imp.ch!news-spur1.maxwell.syr.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!feed2.news.rcn.net!feed1.news.rcn.net!rcn!207-172-97-23 Xref: chonsp.franklin.ch alt.folklore.computers:99921 In article <3C52069F.8A8E9C19@gazonk.del>, "Foobar T. Clown" wrote: >Jim wrote: >> >> Thanks for the PERQ history. > >Yer welcome. I just wish I could remember some dates to go with it. >Oh well, it was ALL 1980-something. What was it about that decade when everything seems to run together? /BAH Subtract a hundred and four for e-mail. ###### From: pmaydell@chiark.greenend.org.uk (Peter Maydell) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,alt.sys.perq Subject: Re: PERQ computers (Was: First DESKTOP Unix Box?) Date: 25 Jan 2002 23:20:46 +0000 (GMT) Organization: University of Cambridge, England Lines: 83 Message-ID: References: <3C50D828.C00036AF@gazonk.del> NNTP-Posting-Host: rapun.sel.cam.ac.uk User-Agent: slrn/0.9.7.1 (Linux) Originator: root@news.chiark.greenend.org.uk ([127.0.0.1]) Path: chonsp.franklin.ch!pfaff.ethz.ch!news-zh.switch.ch!news-ge.switch.ch!news.maxwell.syr.edu!netnews.com!xfer02.netnews.com!feeder.qis.net!btnet-peer!btnet!peer.news.eu-x.com!server2.netnews.ja.net!pegasus.csx.cam.ac.uk!not-for-mail Xref: chonsp.franklin.ch alt.folklore.computers:100187 Foobar T. Clown wrote: > The control store was writable. It was orgainized as 4K words with > some really weird number of bits per word (numbers like 34 and 28 and > 19 keep popping into my head). CPU registers (what the microcode sees; it can obviously fake any width register for user code) are 20 bits wide (24 bits on the rare 2-T4). Microinstructions are 48 bits wide. The width of the bus to the memory board is 16 bits. It's fastest to transfer to or from memory a quadword at a time (64 bits). The CPU architecture more-or-less requires that the instruction set exposed to users is a bytecode of some form. I think that memory is word addressed (ie location X+1 is 16 bits forward from location X) rather than byte addressed, but I could be wrong. I'd check my schematics but I've just moved house and they're buried in a cardboard box somewhere :-< [On the bright side I will now have room to actually house the PERQ...] >A later model expanded the control > store to 16 K words. There was some kind of interface which allowed > the Z80 on the I/O processor to write to the control store at boot time, > but there was also an interface which allowed the CPU to re-write its > own microinstructions. I don't think you could write to the control store using the Z80; at least not with the PERQ 1. At boot up there was a small amount of ROM mapped into the control store, which contained test and bootstrapping code; at some point this code would flip a switch to permanently unmap the ROM in favour of RAM. Most of the microcode in the control store would be loaded from disk (or from another PERQ via PERQlink if you were doing serious microcode development.) I'd be very surprised if the Z80 could access the control store, since the control store writes are one microcycle per third of a 48bit microinstruction, and transfers across the bus between memory, IO and CPU boards don't run that fast. > There were three operating systems used on PERQs that I know of. (No, > I am not counting Aaron Wohl's port of CPM because that ran entirely on > the Z80, and it didn't use the main CPU at all.) The first OS -- called > POS -- was written by Three Rivers. "POS" stood for "Piece Of Shit." > The second OS was Accent. Accent probably was the coolest OS ever. I don't think Accent was very popular in the UK; most UK PERQs ran POS or PNX. > The third OS was called QNX, and it came out of ICL Ltd. in England. > I have never seen a PERQ running QNX, but I understand it to be a port > of something called PNX which I understand was somewhat like UNIX. > AFAIK, the PNX source code was written in the C programming language. > I do not know whether the ICL folk wrote their own microcode, or whether > they wrote a C compiler that targeted the Q-code instruction set. I think you're confused here. (Although possibly I am). The ICL OS was called PNX; QNX is something totally different, unless you had something in mind different from the QNX currently used in embedded systems. I believe (although I have no evidence) that the version of PNX used on PERQs is based on 7th Edition UNIX. I don't think the instruction set used is documented anywhere, and I don't think it's Q-code. [I assume "PNX" to derive in the obvious way from "PERQ UNIX".] > ICL went on to develop something called the Perq 3B (Perq II was just a > new skin wrapped around the same old circuit boards), while the third > company completed the design of what would have been the Perq 3A except > they named it something else. I know nothing of the Perq 3B, but the > Perq 3A was, TA DA!, A 68020 machine running real, honest-to-God, AT&T > UNIX. (It was intended to be a whole lot more than that, but that's > another story.) There seems to be some dispute over what ought to get the PERQ 3a label. The machine I call a PERQ 3a is what ICL called the 3300 Advanced Graphics Workstation: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~pmaydell/hardware/carenath/ which I think is what you're describing as a 3B. It never got anywhere; apparently ICL produced about 30 prototypes for development purposes but canned the project before completion. The OS is PNX 300, a variant of SysVR2; I'd love to have the sources to this but I don't think they exist any more :-< -- PMM ###### From: ard@p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,alt.sys.perq Subject: Re: PERQ computers (Was: First DESKTOP Unix Box?) Followup-To: alt.folklore.computers,alt.sys.perq Date: 26 Jan 2002 01:21:13 -0000 Organization: P850 User Group Distribution: world Message-ID: References: <3C50D828.C00036AF@gazonk.del> NNTP-Posting-Host: p850ug1.demon.co.uk X-NNTP-Posting-Host: p850ug1.demon.co.uk:158.152.97.199 X-Trace: news.demon.co.uk 1012011557 nnrp-08:15265 NO-IDENT p850ug1.demon.co.uk:158.152.97.199 X-Complaints-To: abuse@demon.net X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2] Lines: 127 Path: chonsp.franklin.ch!pfaff.ethz.ch!news-zh.switch.ch!news-ge.switch.ch!newsfeeds.belnet.be!news.belnet.be!colt.net!dispose.news.demon.net!news.demon.co.uk!demon!p850ug1.demon.co.uk!not-for-mail Xref: chonsp.franklin.ch alt.folklore.computers:99861 Foobar T. Clown (fubar@gazonk.del) wrote: : Christopher Stacy wrote: : > : > [...] Simon Bowring ("Simon") writes: : > Simon> Sorry if this is a FAQ.... What was the very first : > commercially available DESKTOP Unix box? : > : > Three Rivers Corporation's PERQ was out in 1980 or 81, [...] It had : > a bitmapped display, mouse, network, and 68000 based processor : > running some kind of UNIX. It was a CMU thing. : All true, except that it didn't use a 68000, and it didn't run UNIX (at Well, apart from the PERQ AGW3300 (aka 3A, IIRC), which is a 68020-based unix box. It's significantly different from other PERQs, so I generally regard it as a PERQ in name only. : There were two processors in the original PERQ I workstation; the main : processor and the I/O processor. The I/O processor was a Z80, and it : handled disk requests, two RS-232 ports, the keyboard, the mouse, and Did the PERQ 1 have 2 RS232 ports? I've not got the docs to hand, but I only remember one of them. The I/O processor handled the floppy drive and on the PERQ 1, the head positioning for the hard disk. The hard disk data went via a hardwired interface based round an AMD2910 sequencer. On the PERQ 1, the Z80 had 4K of RAM, and there was no way to download your own code to it. The only software it ran was contained in EPROMs on the I/O board. On the PERQ 2, there was 16K of RAM on the Z80 and a way to download user programs to it. In fact much of the I/O software is _not_ in EPROM on the PERQ 2 -- it's downloaded when the machine is booted. : a GPIB bus. The I/O processor and all of its peripheral interfaces : occupied one slot in the backplane (circuit boards were approximately : 18 inches by maybe 12 inches.) The original I/O board was quickly They were more square than that. It's actally a standard form-factor board (and edge connectors) -- the boards in my Dylon GPIB magtape controller are the same physical size as those in the PERQ. : replaced by one which also contained a three megabit ethernet interface. : IIRC, the so-called EIO board was a ten layer circuit board (ugly). : The main CPU occupied another whole backplane slot all by itself. It : was built mostly from 74LSxxx TTL. There was one LSI part: A micro- The 4K CPU (PERQ 1) used a few small PROMs for things like state machines and function decoding. The 16K CPU (PERQ 1a and all PERQ 2s) also has a fair number of PALs on the CPU board. Along (in both cases) with a lot of 74S TTL. : sequencer which (I think) was made by AMD, and there was a whole bunch Yes, an AMD2910 sequencer. A rather poor choice as it turned out. This chip would generate a 12 bit address, which was ideal for the 4K control store in the PERQ 1. The problem came when the CPU was upgraded to 16K. There is no real way to extend the 2910. The result was a circuit commonly known as the '2 bit kludge' -- pun totally intentional. This generated the top 2 bits of the 14 bit address for the 16K control store (a 2910 was used for the bottom 12 bits). But there could be no carry from the low 12 bits to the top 2 bits (so code near the top of one 4K block would wrap around to the bottom of that block, rather than continuing in the next block). There were 3 types of jump -- short jumps (changing the bottom 8 bits of the address only), long jumps (changing the bottom 12 bits) and leaps (changing all 14 bits). : of 70nS static RAM for the control store. : The control store was writable. It was orgainized as 4K words with : some really weird number of bits per word (numbers like 34 and 28 and : 19 keep popping into my head). A later model expanded the control No, 48 bits wide... : store to 16 K words. There was some kind of interface which allowed : the Z80 on the I/O processor to write to the control store at boot time, No. The only device that can write to the control store is the main (microprogrammed) CPU. The way it's done is a bit of a hack, and to understand it requires a fair understanding of how the 2910 behaves. Basically, the address to be changed is written to the S register in the 2910. The control store write instruction has to have particular values in the condition and jump fields. At first, the condition input to the 2910 is held in one state, so that the 2910 outputs the contents of the S register. The CPU puts the new data to be written onto the R bus and then asserts the write line to the control store. At the end of that microcycle, the instruction latches are _not_ reloaded. The same instruction tries to execute again, but this time, most of the CPU is inhibited, so no data is updated, the control store is not written to, and so on. But the condition input to the 2910 is now held in the opposite state, and this time the contents of the normal microcode program counter are output to the control store address lines. At the end of this microcycle, the next instruction is fetched from the control store, and the microcode continues. So, how does the machine boot? There's a 512 word bootstrap ROM that overlays the first 512 locations of the control store. It contains the CPU diagnostics, and a bootstrap that tries to load microcode from the PERQlink (16 bit parallel interface), floppy drive and hard drive (in that order). The initial microcode is read in and stored in the control store, and as soon as it is executed the bootstrap ROM is disabled until the next hardware reset. : I personally know of two different instruction sets that were : implemented in microcode. The first one to be used was called the Q- : code instruction set. It was more or less a straightforward implemen- : tation of the UCSD P-Code virtual machine. (Most PERQ software was : written in Pascal, and compiled with the UCSD compiler.) The other one : I know of was the C-MU SPICE Lisp instruction set. There may have been : a third, but more on that below. There is a third one. Called C-code (normally), it was used with PNX, ICL's port of Unix v.7 : The third OS was called QNX, and it came out of ICL Ltd. in England. : I have never seen a PERQ running QNX, but I understand it to be a port : of something called PNX which I understand was somewhat like UNIX. AFAIK QNX and PNX are totally different. PNX is essentially PERQ unix, and does have its own microcode instruction set. -tony ###### Message-ID: <3C52069F.8A8E9C19@gazonk.del> From: "Foobar T. Clown" X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (Win98; I) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,alt.sys.perq Subject: Re: PERQ computers (Was: First DESKTOP Unix Box?) References: <3C50D828.C00036AF@gazonk.del> <250120021325582088%eduorg@com.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Lines: 8 X-Trace: 9ngRkhZJ3kkCmWpVpnhocOlldsl74/C0ubh5GcTT+E1mzJk0qqXs2tRJzDXq0HmPYta1dwoHM9cm!0IKEqtAH1dP1tki4x82VXuUe9olAdXIHlW52GqV7NQ0wgEO0F1gCgAQvf+kiaL7U X-Complaints-To: abuse@gtei.net X-Abuse-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2002 01:28:53 GMT Distribution: world Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2002 01:28:54 GMT Path: chonsp.franklin.ch!pfaff.ethz.ch!news-zh.switch.ch!7041!news.imp.ch!news-spur1.maxwell.syr.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!news.he.net!cyclone-sf.pbi.net!131.119.28.146!paloalto-snh1.gtei.net!news.gtei.net!paloalto-snr2.gtei.net.POSTED!not-for-mail Xref: chonsp.franklin.ch alt.folklore.computers:99773 Jim wrote: > > Thanks for the PERQ history. Yer welcome. I just wish I could remember some dates to go with it. Oh well, it was ALL 1980-something. -- Foo! ###### From: ard@p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,alt.sys.perq Subject: Re: PERQ computers (Was: First DESKTOP Unix Box?) Followup-To: alt.folklore.computers,alt.sys.perq Date: 26 Jan 2002 01:29:57 -0000 Organization: P850 User Group Distribution: world Message-ID: References: <3C50D828.C00036AF@gazonk.del> <250120021325582088%eduorg@com.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: p850ug1.demon.co.uk X-NNTP-Posting-Host: p850ug1.demon.co.uk:158.152.97.199 X-Trace: news.demon.co.uk 1012011559 nnrp-08:15265 NO-IDENT p850ug1.demon.co.uk:158.152.97.199 X-Complaints-To: abuse@demon.net X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2] Lines: 64 Path: chonsp.franklin.ch!pfaff.ethz.ch!news-zh.switch.ch!news-ge.switch.ch!newsfeeds.belnet.be!news.belnet.be!colt.net!dispose.news.demon.net!news.demon.co.uk!demon!p850ug1.demon.co.uk!not-for-mail Xref: chonsp.franklin.ch alt.folklore.computers:99865 Jim (eduorg@com.net) wrote: : In article <3C50D828.C00036AF@gazonk.del>, Foobar T. Clown : wrote: : I used a PERQ system in the1982 to 1985 timeframe. It was a large : brownish box, actually built into the desk. I think it used 8 inch The PERQ1s have dark brown front and back covers (and beige sides). The PERQ2s are a much lighter brown/beige all over. : floppies, and had what looked like a 14 inch hard drive. I also All PERQs other than the PERQ AGW3300 use 8" floppies. The PERQ 1s have the floppy drive horizontal, the PERQ 2s have it vertical. A 14" (SA4000 series) hard disk pretty much identifies the unit as a PERQ 1 or 1a. The PERQ 2T1 has an 8" Micropolis 1200 drive at the back, the PERQ 2T2 and PERQ2T4 have 5.25" ST506-interfaced drives, also at the back. : remember InTran (or possibly Three Rivers - it's been a long time!) : sending us replacement boards when there was a hardware failure, and I Real men repair their own PERQ boards to component level :-). Actually they're quite simple when you get used to them. : remember replacing the I/O board with the Z80 on it, and the hard drive : controller board. There is no separate hard disk controller board in any PERQ 1 or 2. The hard disk controller is on the I/O baord. PERQ 2s have what's called a 'DIB' (Disk Interface board) that sits between the I/O board (the interface to which is similar to that used by the 14" SA4000 drives) and the 8" or 5.25" hard disk. And of course there are several PCBs on the hard disk itself : I've been trying to identify the model of this machine and the OS that : it used for some time. It had a 4 button "puck" as the mouse, that : you had to use on the graphics tablet. Each button was a different The tablet was a Sumagraphics Bit Pad 1, GPIB version. It was the only available pointing device on the PERQ 1s (there were others planned, but AFAIK none were shipped). PERQ 2s have a thing called a Kriz mouse which is 3 button, but which also has to work on its special tablet (about the size of a modern mousmat). The Bit Pad 1 also works on the PERQ 2s, though : color - red, green, blue and yellow as I recall. The software we used : was mainly InTran's stuff, used to actually create forms and fonts for : the Xerox printer. However, I do remember using the "shell" command : from a menu that put you at a command prompt. I also remember a disk : utility called "Scavenger", that was probably a defragger of some kind. : While it was running, the "progress indicator" was a bird flying up and It's normally claimed to be a Vulture :-) Scavenger is used under POS and Accent, I think. I don't recognise the 'shell' command, so it was either Accent (which I've never used) or a custom commadn in your application. : down the screen. It also had a good chess game, and a rather : outstanding pool game! -tony ###### Message-ID: <3C520C57.BF0C722@gazonk.del> From: "Foobar T. Clown" X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (Win98; I) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,alt.sys.perq Subject: Re: PERQ computers (Was: First DESKTOP Unix Box?) References: <3C50D828.C00036AF@gazonk.del> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Lines: 57 X-Trace: +4UIu9Z+6HNwA/GJdZNPzgXXqdVh79qxwOCqaN8zhXbfr6/yf/lZa6vi+ZTxUgKi9gF+wm6BhYkf!EwojX/gHaqgPOkM1ZbfXBBW70QyVDkCdhJb3TVdSpXEo97rRqm1tU3eGCNbgYZej X-Complaints-To: abuse@gtei.net X-Abuse-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2002 01:53:22 GMT Distribution: world Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2002 01:53:22 GMT Path: chonsp.franklin.ch!pfaff.ethz.ch!news-zh.switch.ch!13398!news.imp.ch!news-spur1.maxwell.syr.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!logbridge.uoregon.edu!paloalto-snh1.gtei.net!news.gtei.net!paloalto-snr2.gtei.net.POSTED!not-for-mail Xref: chonsp.franklin.ch alt.folklore.computers:99760 Peter Maydell wrote: > > Foobar T. Clown wrote: > > The control store was writable. It was orgainized as 4K words with > > some really weird number of bits per word (numbers like 34 and 28 > > and 19 keep popping into my head). > > CPU registers (what the microcode sees; it can obviously fake any > width register for user code) are 20 bits wide (24 bits on the rare > 2-T4). I never knew it by that name, but there was a time I could have told you more about that 24-bit CPU than you'd ever have wanted to know. I am the person who modified Accent so it could use the extra four bits of physical address space, and I am the person who changed the microcode for the multiply instructions to use the "multiply step" hardware. > I think that memory is word addressed (ie location X+1 is 16 bits > forward from location X) rather than byte addressed, but I could > be wrong. You are not wrong. The original PERQ could access up to 1M word (what we would call 2M Bytes today) with its 20-bit physical address space. The 24-bit PERQ could have addressed up to 16-M words, but AFAIK, no- one ever built a memory board that big. > I don't think you could write to the control store using the Z80; > at least not with the PERQ 1. At boot up there was a small amount of > ROM mapped into the control store, which contained test and > bootstrapping code; at some point this code would flip a switch > to permanently unmap the ROM in favour of RAM. Oh! O.K. The I/O processor always was a complete mystery to me. > > The third OS was called QNX, [...] I have never seen a PERQ running > > QNX, but I understand it to be a port of something called PNX [...] > > I think you're confused here. (Although possibly I am). The ICL OS > was called PNX; QNX is something totally different Like I said, I've never seen a PERQ running it. You have. I probably am the one who is confused. > > ICL went on to develop something called the Perq 3B [...] while > > the third company completed the design of what would have been the > > Perq 3A except they named it something else. > > There seems to be some dispute over what ought to get the PERQ 3a > label. The machine I call a PERQ 3a is [...] I think is what you're > describing as a 3B. O.K., then the one I called the 3A probably was the 3B. It never went anywhere either except into the innards of a machine that was never sold as a general purpose workstation. -- Foo! ###### From: Jim Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,alt.sys.perq Subject: Re: PERQ computers (Was: First DESKTOP Unix Box?) Date: 26 Jan 2002 22:27:21 -0600 Lines: 63 Distribution: world Message-ID: <260120022324302052%eduorg@com.net> References: <3C50D828.C00036AF@gazonk.del> <250120021325582088%eduorg@com.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-transfer-encoding: 8bit User-Agent: Thoth/1.4.2 (Carbon/OS X) Path: chonsp.franklin.ch!pfaff.ethz.ch!news-zh.switch.ch!19983!news.imp.ch!news-spur1.maxwell.syr.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!newsfeed.novia.net.MISMATCH!novia!novia!sequencer.newscene.com!not-for-mail Xref: chonsp.franklin.ch alt.folklore.computers:99836 In article , Tony Duell wrote: > Jim (eduorg@com.net) wrote: > : In article <3C50D828.C00036AF@gazonk.del>, Foobar T. Clown > : wrote: > > : I used a PERQ system in the1982 to 1985 timeframe. It was a large > : brownish box, actually built into the desk. I think it used 8 inch > > The PERQ1s have dark brown front and back covers (and beige sides). The > PERQ2s are a much lighter brown/beige all over. It *was* dark brown! Chocolate brown, I'd say. > : remember InTran (or possibly Three Rivers - it's been a long time!) > : sending us replacement boards when there was a hardware failure, and I > > Real men repair their own PERQ boards to component level :-). Actually > they're quite simple when you get used to them. Well, I do plenty of component-level repairs of boards these days, but I wasn't up to it 18 years ago! :-) > > : remember replacing the I/O board with the Z80 on it, and the hard drive > : controller board. > > There is no separate hard disk controller board in any PERQ 1 or 2. The > hard disk controller is on the I/O baord. PERQ 2s have what's called a > 'DIB' (Disk Interface board) that sits between the I/O board (the > interface to which is similar to that used by the 14" SA4000 drives) and > the 8" or 5.25" hard disk. And of course there are several PCBs on the > hard disk itself It's possible my memory is wrong. I just remember replacing a board when we had hard drive problems. We did *not* replace the drive itself, however. > : While it was running, the "progress indicator" was a bird flying up and > > It's normally claimed to be a Vulture :-) Yes! It *was* a vulture! > Scavenger is used under POS and Accent, I think. I don't recognise the > 'shell' command, so it was either Accent (which I've never used) or a custom > commadn in your application. It could easily have been a custom command. It was just a menu choice somewhere, that when you clicked it, you were dumped into a command line terminal. I don't recall now if you had to reboot or type "exit" or something to get back to the main system. I *do* remember being extremely impressed by the machine. The software was positively 21st century stuff back then, and saved me hundreds of hours of time. Also, I had never seen or heard of a Perq (or Three Rivers) before then. I've also never seen or heard about one since. Until now! Jim ###### From: Iain A F Fleming Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,alt.sys.perq Subject: Re: PERQ computers (Was: First DESKTOP Unix Box?) Date: 27 Jan 2002 21:32:23 +0000 Organization: Circuit Software Systems Ltd Lines: 30 Sender: iainf@kororaa.com Message-ID: <6hsn8rscns.fsf@blue.kororaa.com> References: <3C50D828.C00036AF@gazonk.del> NNTP-Posting-Host: modem-344.aerodactyl.dialup.pol.co.uk Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Trace: purple.gradwell.net 1012167764 54329 217.135.7.88 (27 Jan 2002 21:42:44 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@gradwell.net NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 27 Jan 2002 21:42:44 +0000 (UTC) X-no-archive: yes User-Agent: Gnus/5.0808 (Gnus v5.8.8) XEmacs/21.4 (Artificial Intelligence) Path: chonsp.franklin.ch!pfaff.ethz.ch!news-zh.switch.ch!22836!news.imp.ch!news-spur1.maxwell.syr.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!lon1-news.nildram.net!news.gradwell.net!news2.kororaa.com!nobody Xref: chonsp.franklin.ch alt.folklore.computers:100012 "Foobar T. Clown" writes: > The third OS was called QNX, and it came out of ICL Ltd. in England. > I have never seen a PERQ running QNX, but I understand it to be a > port of something called PNX which I understand was somewhat like > UNIX. You're partly right, and partly wrong. The OS was called PNX (pronouned Peenix). It was a straight port of 7th Edition Unix. And as to England, the port was actually done at ICL's facility in Dalkeith, Scotland. I used to have a set of the sources for it, which I handed on to one of the other PERQ fanatics in the UK a few years back, when I got rid of my last few PERQs. Then I later went to work for a company (Spider Software) with a CTO whose name (Nick Felesiak) I recognised from the comments in the sources... > AFAIK, the PNX source code was written in the C programming > language. I do not know whether the ICL folk wrote their own > microcode, or whether they wrote a C compiler that targeted the > Q-code instruction set. They wrote their own microcode. There was also a fourth OS, also written in the UK, called FLEX. It came from the DERA (the UK DARPA). IT was a secure system, and a bizzare combintion of Algol-68 language and Smalltalk interface. -- Iain A F Fleming Circuit Software Systems Tel: +44 1506 671 992 Mob: +44 7789 692 777 ###### From: alan.nospam@glaramara.freeserve.co.uk (Alan J. Wylie) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,alt.sys.perq Subject: Re: PERQ computers (Was: First DESKTOP Unix Box?) Date: 27 Jan 2002 23:41:13 +0000 Organization: very little Lines: 24 Message-ID: References: <3C50D828.C00036AF@gazonk.del> NNTP-Posting-Host: modem-811.orangutan.dialup.pol.co.uk Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Trace: newsg1.svr.pol.co.uk 1012174920 17198 217.135.227.43 (27 Jan 2002 23:42:00 GMT) NNTP-Posting-Date: 27 Jan 2002 23:42:00 GMT X-Complaints-To: abuse@theplanet.net User-Agent: Gnus/5.09 (Gnus v5.9.0) Emacs/21.1 Path: chonsp.franklin.ch!pfaff.ethz.ch!news-zh.switch.ch!29658935!news.imp.ch!psinet-eu-nl!newsfeeds.belnet.be!news.belnet.be!colt.net!dispose.news.demon.net!demon!diablo.theplanet.net!news.theplanet.net!bilbo!not-for-mail Xref: chonsp.franklin.ch alt.folklore.computers:99919 On Fri, 25 Jan 2002 03:58:33 GMT, "Foobar T. Clown" said: > The third OS was called QNX, and it came out of ICL Ltd. in England. > I have never seen a PERQ running QNX, but I understand it to be a > port of something called PNX which I understand was somewhat like > UNIX. AFAIK, the PNX source code was written in the C programming > language. I do not know whether the ICL folk wrote their own > microcode, or whether they wrote a C compiler that targeted the > Q-code instruction set. I can remember one of these being brought to my company for a demo, and given to me to play with[1] sometime in the early 80's. We were rather unsure about the wisdom of the naming of the O/S. IIRC, it was a bit-mapped display - portrait format?, and if you ran a Fortran compilation, part of the display memory was re-allocated as memory for the compiler, causing pretty blinkenlights on the screen. [1] i.e. break. -- Alan J. Wylie http://www.glaramara.freeserve.co.uk/ "Perfection [in design] is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but rather when there is nothing left to take away." Antoine de Saint-Exupery ###### From: ard@p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,alt.sys.perq Subject: Re: PERQ computers (Was: First DESKTOP Unix Box?) Followup-To: alt.folklore.computers,alt.sys.perq Date: 28 Jan 2002 00:01:25 -0000 Organization: P850 User Group Distribution: world Message-ID: References: <3C50D828.C00036AF@gazonk.del> <250120021325582088%eduorg@com.net> <260120022324302052%eduorg@com.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: p850ug1.demon.co.uk X-NNTP-Posting-Host: p850ug1.demon.co.uk:158.152.97.199 X-Trace: news.demon.co.uk 1012182186 nnrp-01:773 NO-IDENT p850ug1.demon.co.uk:158.152.97.199 X-Complaints-To: abuse@demon.net X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2] Lines: 66 Path: chonsp.franklin.ch!pfaff.ethz.ch!news-zh.switch.ch!news-ge.switch.ch!news.bme.hu!andromeda.datanet.hu!newsfeed.gamma.ru!Gamma.RU!dispose.news.demon.net!news.demon.co.uk!demon!p850ug1.demon.co.uk!not-for-mail Xref: chonsp.franklin.ch alt.folklore.computers:99855 Jim (eduorg@com.net) wrote: : In article , Tony Duell : wrote: : > Jim (eduorg@com.net) wrote: : > : In article <3C50D828.C00036AF@gazonk.del>, Foobar T. Clown : > : wrote: : > : > : I used a PERQ system in the1982 to 1985 timeframe. It was a large : > : brownish box, actually built into the desk. I think it used 8 inch : > : > The PERQ1s have dark brown front and back covers (and beige sides). The : > PERQ2s are a much lighter brown/beige all over. : It *was* dark brown! Chocolate brown, I'd say. Then it was almost certainly a PERQ 1 or PERQ 1a. These are essentially the same machine except that the PERQ 1 has the original 4K WCS CPU, the 1a has the 16K WCS CPU. Many PERQ 1s were upgraded to 1as by a CPU board replacemnet. : Well, I do plenty of component-level repairs of boards these days, but : I wasn't up to it 18 years ago! :-) Amazing :-). Most people (not me, I hasten to add) have gone the other way, from doing compoennt level repair to just board swapping. Oh well... : > the 8" or 5.25" hard disk. And of course there are several PCBs on the : > hard disk itself : It's possible my memory is wrong. I just remember replacing a board : when we had hard drive problems. We did *not* replace the drive : itself, however. Back then, the PCBs on the drive mechanism itself (down the left hand side of a PERQ 1) were not in any way 'keyed' to the HDA (Head Disk Assembly). If you had disk drive problems then even board-swappers would try replacing the PCBs on the drive mechanism first. The idea was to allow the user to keep the same disks, so as to keep the data, if at all possible. I was wondering if you replaced the seek control board, or something, on the disk drive. It's a simple enough thing to remove.... Incidentally, on the Micropolis 1200 drive used in the 2T1, there's a PROM on the digital board that contains the bad track map, etc. If you replace the board you have to pull the PROM from the socket on the old board and put it into the new board. : > : While it was running, the "progress indicator" was a bird flying up and : > : > It's normally claimed to be a Vulture :-) : Yes! It *was* a vulture! And off couse the 'busy bee' that flew around the screen when the machine was doing certain operations. : I *do* remember being extremely impressed by the machine. The I'm still impressed by them. That's probably why I have 4 of the little toys :-) -tony ###### From: Jim Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,alt.sys.perq Subject: Re: PERQ computers (Was: First DESKTOP Unix Box?) Date: 28 Jan 2002 21:29:08 -0600 Lines: 38 Distribution: world Message-ID: <280120022227278346%eduorg@com.net> References: <3C50D828.C00036AF@gazonk.del> <250120021325582088%eduorg@com.net> <260120022324302052%eduorg@com.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-transfer-encoding: 8bit User-Agent: Thoth/1.4.2 (Carbon/OS X) Path: chonsp.franklin.ch!pfaff.ethz.ch!news-zh.switch.ch!surfnet.nl!news-spur1.maxwell.syr.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!newsfeed.novia.net.MISMATCH!novia!novia!sequencer.newscene.com!not-for-mail Xref: chonsp.franklin.ch alt.folklore.computers:99847 In article , Tony Duell wrote: > Then it was almost certainly a PERQ 1 or PERQ 1a. These are essentially > the same machine except that the PERQ 1 has the original 4K WCS CPU, the > 1a has the 16K WCS CPU. Many PERQ 1s were upgraded to 1as by a CPU board > replacemnet. I've done a little research over the weekend. Doing a Yahoo search on "Perq" turned up some interesting pages! Yes, it was a Perq1. > > : Well, I do plenty of component-level repairs of boards these days, but > : I wasn't up to it 18 years ago! :-) > > Amazing :-). Most people (not me, I hasten to add) have gone the other way, > from doing compoennt level repair to just board swapping. Oh well... I meant that 18 years ago I was a junior programmer. I wasn't into hardware repairs yet. > : > It's normally claimed to be a Vulture :-) > > : Yes! It *was* a vulture! > > And off couse the 'busy bee' that flew around the screen when the machine > was doing certain operations. Thanks - I had *totally* forgotten about the busy bee! > : I *do* remember being extremely impressed by the machine. The > > I'm still impressed by them. That's probably why I have 4 of the little > toys :-) I wish. You wouldn't happen to know where any are stashed, would you? :-) Jim ###### Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,alt.sys.perq From: Jamie Jones Subject: Re: PERQ computers (Was: First DESKTOP Unix Box?) References: <3C50D828.C00036AF@gazonk.del> Organization: The Bishopston Network (http://www.bishopston.net/) X-newsgroup: alt.sys.perq X-In-Response-To: Tony Duell X-NO-Junk: Support the ban of unsolicited junk email - http://www.cauce.org/ Message-ID: User-Agent: slrn/0.9.7.3 (FreeBSD) Cache-Post-Path: catflap.bishopston.net!unknown@mailhost1.bishopston.net X-Cache: nntpcache 2.4.0b5 (see http://www.nntpcache.org/) Lines: 15 Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2002 19:42:06 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 24.67.16.241 X-Complaints-To: abuse@home.net X-Trace: news1.rdc1.bc.home.com 1014406926 24.67.16.241 (Fri, 22 Feb 2002 11:42:06 PST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2002 11:42:06 PST Path: chonsp.franklin.ch!pfaff.ethz.ch!news-zh.switch.ch!news.imp.ch!news.imp.ch!news-spur1.maxwell.syr.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!newshub2.home.com!news.home.com!news1.rdc1.bc.home.com.POSTED!not-for-mail Xref: chonsp.franklin.ch alt.folklore.computers:102373 On 26 Jan 2002 01:21:13 -0000, Tony Duell wrote in newsgroup alt.sys.perq: > Did the PERQ 1 have 2 RS232 ports? I've not got the docs to hand, but I > only remember one of them. Pretty sure it was only one - I used to use a terminal in mine, and I used to have to unplug it if I needed to use the modem... -- Jamie Jones http://www.bishopston.com/jamie/ --- 306 days to Christmas! Word of the day: "azoisobutyronitrile" ---- "I'm not big, and I'm not clever. And I'm definitely not funny." ----------- The reply address on this posting expires in 7 days time. ###### From: afrb2@statslab.cam.ac.uk (Alan Bain) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,alt.sys.perq Subject: Re: PERQ computers (Was: First DESKTOP Unix Box?) Date: 23 Feb 2002 23:03:33 -0000 Organization: Statistical Laboratory Lines: 20 Message-ID: References: <3C50D828.C00036AF@gazonk.del> NNTP-Posting-Host: palace.statslab.cam.ac.uk Path: chonsp.franklin.ch!pfaff.ethz.ch!news-zh.switch.ch!news.imp.ch!news.imp.ch!fr.clara.net!heighliner.fr.clara.net!proxad.net!news-hub.cableinet.net!blueyonder!btnet-peer!btnet!peer.news.eu-x.com!server2.netnews.ja.net!pegasus.csx.cam.ac.uk!not-for-mail Xref: chonsp.franklin.ch alt.folklore.computers:102540 In article , Jamie Jones wrote: >On 26 Jan 2002 01:21:13 -0000, > Tony Duell > wrote in newsgroup alt.sys.perq: > >> Did the PERQ 1 have 2 RS232 ports? I've not got the docs to hand, but I >> only remember one of them. > >Pretty sure it was only one - I used to use a terminal in mine, and I used >to have to unplug it if I needed to use the modem... Mine only has one.... I think you will remember when the Perq was the serial console for the PD11/34 under my bed in my college room, before Peter Maydell lent me his Z88 which meant I could program in the kitchen and escape the noise. You made some reference to my useless collection of terminals (a TTY 43 and a Perq IIRC). Alan ###### X-Trace-PostClient-IP: 24.67.16.241 Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,alt.sys.perq From: Jamie Jones Subject: Re: PERQ computers (Was: First DESKTOP Unix Box?) References: <3C50D828.C00036AF@gazonk.del> Organization: The Bishopston Network (http://www.bishopston.net/) Followup-To: alt.sys.perq X-newsgroup: alt.sys.perq X-In-Response-To: Alan Bain X-NO-Junk: Support the ban of unsolicited junk email - http://www.cauce.org/ Message-ID: User-Agent: slrn/0.9.7.3 (FreeBSD) Cache-Post-Path: catflap.bishopston.net!unknown@mailhost1.bishopston.net X-Cache: nntpcache 2.4.0b5 (see http://www.nntpcache.org/) Lines: 15 Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2002 02:28:40 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 24.66.94.143 X-Complaints-To: abuse@shaw.ca X-Trace: news3.calgary.shaw.ca 1015986520 24.66.94.143 (Tue, 12 Mar 2002 19:28:40 MST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2002 19:28:40 MST Path: chonsp.franklin.ch!pfaff.ethz.ch!news-zh.switch.ch!news-ge.switch.ch!enews.sgi.com!telocity-west!TELOCITY!hub1.nntpserver.com!peer1-sjc1.usenetserver.com!usenetserver.com!pd2nf1so.cg.shawcable.net!residential.shaw.ca!news3.calgary.shaw.ca.POSTED!not-for-mail Xref: chonsp.franklin.ch alt.folklore.computers:103790 On 23 Feb 2002 23:03:33 -0000, Alan Bain wrote in newsgroup alt.sys.perq: > and escape the noise. You made some reference to my useless collection of > terminals (a TTY 43 and a Perq IIRC). Me ??? I don't recall, but I do remember you, and you are probably correct ! -- Jamie Jones http://www.bishopston.com/jamie/ --- 287 days to Christmas! Word of the day: "hepaticopulmonary" ---- "I'm not big, and I'm not clever. And I'm definitely not funny." ----------- The reply address on this posting expires in 7 days time.