9 Jun
2025
9 Jun
'25
10:20 p.m.
On Mon, 9 Jun 2025 15:16:08 -0400, Henry Bent
<henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com <mailto:henry.r.bent@gmail.com>> wrote:
On Mon, 9 Jun 2025 at 14:59, Lawrence Stewart <stewart(a)serissa.com
<mailto:stewart@serissa.com>> wrote:
I have a set of Firefly boards (I worked on the Taos operating system for the Firefly).
But as far as I can tell, no software survives.
Charles P. Thacker and Lawrence C. Stewart. 1987. Firefly: a multiprocessor workstation.
In Proceedings of the second international conference on Architectual support for
programming languages and operating systems (ASPLOS II). Association for Computing
Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 164–172. https://doi.org/10.1145/36206.36199
Paul McJones and Garret Swart. Evolving the UNIX system interface to support multithreaded
programs. Proceedings of the Winter 1989 USENIX Conference, December 1989.
http://www.mcjones.org/paul/evolving.pdf Also available as Part I of SRC Research Report
21 (https://mcjones.org/paul/SRC-RR-21.pdf) Part II of which is the Taos
Programmer's Manual.
Paul McJones and Andy Hisgen. The Topaz system: Distributed multiprocessor personal
computing. Workshop on Workstation Operating Systems. IEEE Computer Society Technical
Committee on Operating Systems, November 1987. http://www.mcjones.org/paul/wwospos.pdf
(Topaz was the name for the Modula-2+ programming environment, which also ran on VAX
Ultrix.)
Paul
My rare items are only Unix-adjacent. ... I
have some boards for a Digital
Firefly, a research vax multiprocessor that ran a Modula-2 based OS that
would run Ultrix binaries.
That's incredibly cool. Do you know if any of the Firefly machines
survived? I saw a VAXstation 3540 for sale at some point recently but it
was well out of my price range; I hope it found a good home.
-Henry