On Sat, Nov 26, 2022, at 11:18 AM, Larry McVoy wrote: 7300 and the 6300, I suppose!) It was definitely a weird beast. I'm only "fond" of it in the loosest possible sense because I spent so much time trying to understand its internals. It was the perfect combination of too slow, too low specs, and too expensive! I think one of my slides will simply say "IT WAS BAD AT BEING A COMPUTER" -Seth -- Seth Morabito Poulsbo, WA web(a)loomcom.com

Seth, I've often said the only reason they sold any of them was that AT&T required you to buy one as the reference system for SVR3 - so anyone that wanted to port it tended to buy one 3B2 just to have it as the reference box. Rob's comment about the BELLMAC-32 was interesting. I could never quite understand why AT&T wanted to create its own microprocessor and associated ISA and try to sell it against the other merchant microprocessors (just as I never could understand why HP and IBM did either - but they were already formally in the computer business). Selling chips to other people to use for their designs is a difficult business that needs a sophisticated sales and marketing team. Even if AT&T could create a technically competitive device and get the manufacturing cost structure in line with Moto or Intel so that the street price could be competitive, the previous sales and marketing scheme of abandoning UNIX on your doorstep was not going to work, and it was having a new technical sales support team to match Intel and Moto was just not going to happen any time soon. Supporting the operating companies is a different beast than supporting, say, a start-up trying to build a hot new device -> that company's product. While I suspect Rob and Bart built their own tools for the redox of the Blit, Rob I ask you -- truly if you have been outside of AT&T, could you imagine trying to use that device? I can't. I've told the details of the story elsewhere, and they don't really matter here. But I remember being at Masscomp and finding a bug in the new FP chip for the 68020 - which was causing a 'stop shop' on our newest product - when one of the factory exercisers/diags started to fail. We were paying a premium at the time and Moto's local folks did not want to listen at first. Our head of HW came to me because he knew that I knew a bit about the application program they were using as a test from my grad school days. With the end help of the Fortran compiler back-end guys in a few hours of debugging, I was able to isolate the chip failure. Then I wrote a new 10-line Fortran example and associated assembler code, which we faxed to Moto. Moto had a 'Technical Consulting Engineer' on the line from Austin, and indeed it was validated as a problem, and less than 12 hrs later their team had figured out what was going on in the chip. I bring this up because I just don't see AT&T has been able to react that way, although, in the end, we had to solve it once Moto figure out what the cause of the error was (a slow charge circuit was wiping out the exponent in R/R instructions under certain conditions - so we changed the compiler not generate the sequence so we should still ship). ᐧ

On Sat, Nov 26, 2022 at 06:00:38PM -0500, Marc Donner wrote: Sun Microsystems has entered the chat... They very much competed with DEC and ate their lunch.

I read the Wikipedia page on the 9000. It's sad that the 9000 wasn't cancelled when they had better alternatives.

We were "gifted" a 3B2, as in "take this and use it!". I ran a "ps" command in single user mode, and it took 20 seconds to run. Our machine names were themed around bird names, so we christened the 3B2 "junco". Our director said we had to get along, so we renamed it "jay". But everyone knew what the J stood for. The 3B2 served as a doorstop. On Sat, Nov 26, 2022 at 11:44 PM Phil Budne <phil(a)ultimate.com> wrote: > Larry McVoy wrote: > > I read the Wikipedia page on the 9000. It's sad that the 9000 > > wasn't cancelled when they had better alternatives. > > In an oral history Bob Supnik described Ken Olsen couldn't get his > head around the fact that the NVAX chip could equal the 9000: > > @2:59:45 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3tcCBHRIfU > > In part 2, Bob described how then DEC VP Gordon Bell having earlier > predicted when the microprocessor performance curve would cross over > minis and mainframes: > > @1:51:45 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3tcCBHRIfU > > He also talks about how the company couldn't command the bsame gross > margins as it did in the VAX era. >

. But everyone knew what the J stood for. The 3B2 served as a doorstop. Shades of the jerq terminal. The J prefix persiste in the code long after the nickname was quashed. Being in charge of the Rutgers computer center, we were gifted a lot of ATT hardware. We had one 3B20 (now that was a pure piece of phone equipment, you shut it down by turning a switch inside and holding the button down until it twanged. Just like putting an old 303 modem into loop back). We also got three 3B5's (noted for the one installed in the New Brunswick computing room that got completely drenched when a pipe burst and kept on running) and countless of the 3B2s. I chortled in that unless you were logged in as root, you couldn't work the power switch. Yanking the cord out of the wall was still and option.

Georgia Tech got two 3B20s. They did very little more than consume electricity and look impressive. I wanted to port 4.2BSD to them, but that never got off the ground. "Ron Natalie" <ron(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote:

I have a 3b2/300. Anytime you run a command that is compute bound, like factoring a large prime number, the CPU buzzes! Bill Corcoran On Nov 27, 2022, at 9:52 AM, John P. Linderman <jpl.jpl(a)gmail.com> wrote:  [EXTERNAL] We were "gifted" a 3B2, as in "take this and use it!". I ran a "ps" command in single user mode, and it took 20 seconds to run. Our machine names were themed around bird names, so we christened the 3B2 "junco". Our director said we had to get along, so we renamed it "jay". But everyone knew what the J stood for. The 3B2 served as a doorstop. On Sat, Nov 26, 2022 at 11:44 PM Phil Budne <phil(a)ultimate.com> wrote: THIS IS AN EXTERNAL EMAIL -- This email was sent from someone OUTSIDE of the NSM Insurance Group email system. PLEASE USE CAUTION WHEN REVIEWING THIS EMAIL.

I was visiting Holmdel in 1981, and there was a tradeshow for the BellMAC CPUs there, filling ground floor of the central atrium. There was some swag, which I had for a few years, including refrigerator magnets. The one I remember: "Don't be alone, call MACphone!" I remember reading an article in the early 80s pointing out that, due to the scale of the Bell System, the center of the universe of semiconductor fabrication at that time was ... Allentown, PA. Western Electric had an ad, along the lines of, "who will create the 256 Kb memory part? WE will" -- WE as in Western Electric.Those parts would have been fabbed in Allentown IIRC. It is a bit hard to recall, much less believe. but PA, land of dead still mills, the Molly Maguires, and underground coal mine fires that will burn for centuries, also had silicon. On Mon, Nov 28, 2022 at 1:01 PM Kenneth Goodwin < kennethgoodwin56(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: > That must be the 300 B superhive model CPU > > On Mon, Nov 28, 2022, 1:54 PM William Corcoran &lt;wlc(a)jctaylor.com&gt; wrote: > >> I have a 3b2/300. Anytime you run a command that is compute bound, like >> factoring a large prime number, the CPU buzzes! >> >> >> >> Bill Corcoran >> >> >> >> >> >> On Nov 27, 2022, at 9:52 AM, John P. Linderman &lt;jpl.jpl(a)gmail.com&gt; >> wrote: >> >>  >> >> [EXTERNAL] >> >> >> We were "gifted" a 3B2, as in "take this and use it!". I ran a "ps" >> command in single user mode, and it took 20 seconds to run. >> Our machine names were themed around bird names, so we christened the >> 3B2 "junco". Our director said we had to get along, >> so we renamed it "jay". But everyone knew what the J stood for. The 3B2 >> served as a doorstop. >> >> On Sat, Nov 26, 2022 at 11:44 PM Phil Budne &lt;phil(a)ultimate.com&gt; wrote: >> >>> Larry McVoy wrote: >>> > I read the Wikipedia page on the 9000. It's sad that the 9000 >>> > wasn't cancelled when they had better alternatives. >>> >>> In an oral history Bob Supnik described Ken Olsen couldn't get his >>> head around the fact that the NVAX chip could equal the 9000: >>> >>> @2:59:45 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3tcCBHRIfU >>> >>> In part 2, Bob described how then DEC VP Gordon Bell having earlier >>> predicted when the microprocessor performance curve would cross over >>> minis and mainframes: >>> >>> @1:51:45 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3tcCBHRIfU >>> >>> He also talks about how the company couldn't command the bsame gross >>> margins as it did in the VAX era. >>> >> >> >> THIS IS AN EXTERNAL EMAIL -- This email was sent from someone OUTSIDE of >> the NSM Insurance Group email system. PLEASE USE CAUTION WHEN REVIEWING >> THIS EMAIL. >> >>

A few 3B2 stories... In the late 1970's there were no 3B2's (yet), but there was the MAC 8 processor. The name "MAC 8" was problematic to me and my coworkers: it stood for Microprocessor Advisory Committee. It was a processor designed by a committee! It was slow and more problematically, it was not hardware compatible with Intel 8080 support chips. I don't remember all of the details but it was an edge versus level set of problems. It was fun to program. There was an evaluation box (called a MacTutor) that you connected to an RS-232 line to connect it with a PDP-11 UNIX system for cross-assembly/cross-compiling (the assembler language was as close to C as an assembler language could get). The MacTutor was a fun toy. The MAC 8 in production hardware (at least in Holmdel) was a disaster. See https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_westernEleC8TUTORJul79_3968770/mode/2… In the early 1980's, I was a Bell Labs technical supervisor in a number of different development (in contrast to research) organizations. There was considerable pressure on my management (and me) to utilize 3B2's instead of DEC hardware; a little later (about 1986) there was pressure to use 6300's and later 6386's (which ran UNIX). My first experience with an original 3B2 (one without a model number) was identical to that of John P Linderman's. Compiling a modest C program took forever. A little later they gave that one a model number of 300 and came out with a 400, which was almost reasonable and a 310 which, I believe, had the same processor and clock as a 400 with less expansion slots. Later came the 600 and 700, which were pretty reasonable and we used them for a number of products (DEFINITY Manager 3 for administering a large PBX was one I brought to market with my team).

In October, 1996 I was promoted to development department head of Global Messaging Services (GMS) which was better known as AT&T Mail. It was a hectic time to be joining the organization as the job I took had been being filled temporarily by another person (who was a friend of mine and, like me, was new to the organization) and they were in the final throes of development of a significant new release, about to go into system test (in another department). One of the first things I learned is that the service ran on many 3b2/600's mostly in two locations in the US, but had many small worldwide locations (Hong Kong, Tokyo, Sydney, Tel Aviv, London, Moscow, and some others I don't remember) all connected by DataKit. The US systems had been running for many years and could not be powered off, because the disk drives would seize and not spin up due to an absence of lubricant (as I was told). This presented some challenges, as I liked to power cycle systems I worked on and could not do this here. The release was deployed on Valentine's Day, 1997. It was the worst deployment in the service's history. Most everything broke. System test hadn't found these very many latent bugs that were deployed. It was all hands on deck, working all hours 7x24 with two conference calls a day with the Operations organization (running the servers) and the Customer Care organization (fielding customer complaints) until things quieted down towards the end of March. It was then that I was able to pay more attention to future plans, which were to replace the 3B2's with Stratus hardware running their fault tolerant unix (FTX). We had a number of their dual processor systems in lab test and had just taken delivery of a four processor system, which is what my predecessor had specified for purchase to replace all of the US based 3B2's. A group of 3 engineers (one of whom I had hired in 1980) worked on running benchmarks of GMS workloads on the Stratus systems and working with Stratus engineers to get fixes to problems in their code when they arose. They presented the first set of quad processor benchmarks to me and they were all slower than the "twin" (or 2 processor) benchmarks. I requested daily updates on the status of this as it was bizarre and indeed a disaster for our plans. This culminated in my requesting that Stratus send a small group of their FTX engineers to my location for (what I called) a formal architecture review of the Quad and FTX. The review was scheduled for a week. After the first morning, I told them that they should go back to Stratus and that we'd be in touch. I wrote the following in an email to my boss, my product manager peer and a handful of others: Yesterday, 4/15/97, Stratus engineers from their hardware development, FTX (UNIX) development and performance and design groups met with members of GMS R&D and AT&T Labs to share information about the Stratus and GMS architectures. Executive summary: the Quad will never work for GMS. The Stratus 1225 (aka "Twin"), is a true SMP (symmetric multi-processor). The two CPUs each have a one megabyte instruction cache and a one megabyte data cache, and they both share a memory system of 512 megabytes. Cache coherency is maintained by a pair of custom chips (ASICs). When data is in a processor's cache, there is no contention possible. When data is in the memory system, there is an additional penalty of between 250-390 nanoseconds. Input and output take place on a slower bus. The Stratus 1245 (aka "Quad") consists of two twin boards that communicate via the I/O (i.e., slow) bus. This is not symmetric, hence not SMP. Each board contains 512MB of memory. All of the Unix kernel data resides on one board (the boot board). When a processor on the non-boot board needs to access memory on the boot board, the cost is 1700 nanoseconds (a penalty of 4.4 to 6.8 times worse). Since all Unix kernel data resides on the boot board, any software that makes significant use of Unix system calls (e.g., GMS) will pay a high penalty when running on the non-boot board. Further, if a program (e.g., the GMS User Agent) is simultaneously running on both boards, its instructions will reside in the memory of only one of the boards, thus incurring significant overhead to access instructions for some processes. It appears that the hardware designers never consulted with the Unix designers. They are located in different locations (Massachusetts and California), which can't help. They claim they've seen between 1.4 and 1.6 times improvement in going from Twin to Quad for other customers. They do note, however, that an optimal application for the Quad is one which needs to execute application user-mode instructions and make very few system calls (e.g., a graphics rendering application). GMS, in its current architecture, assumes free and easy access to system calls. GMS can never run well on a Quad. We should immediately abandon any efforts aimed at deploying Quads and focus all of our attention on extracting compensatory Twins from Stratus. Needless to say, we were able to get an appropriate number of Twins and retired all of our 3B2s. Alan On Mon, Nov 28, 2022 at 5:45 PM Marc Donner &lt;marc.donner(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: > IBM built a major semiconductor fab up in Fishkill, NY. About two hours > drive north of NYC. At one point (mid-1980s) it was the biggest fab in the > world according to some metric. > > On Mon, Nov 28, 2022, 17:35 ron minnich &lt;rminnich(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: > >> I was visiting Holmdel in 1981, and there was a tradeshow for the >> BellMAC CPUs there, filling ground floor of the central atrium. There was >> some swag, which I had for a few years, including refrigerator magnets. The >> one I remember: >> "Don't be alone, call MACphone!" >> >> I remember reading an article in the early 80s pointing out that, due to >> the scale of the Bell System, the center of the universe of semiconductor >> fabrication at that time was ... Allentown, PA. Western Electric had an ad, >> along the lines of, "who will create the 256 Kb memory part? WE will" -- WE >> as in Western Electric.Those parts would have been fabbed in Allentown >> IIRC. >> >> It is a bit hard to recall, much less believe. but PA, land of dead >> still mills, the Molly Maguires, and underground coal mine fires that will >> burn for centuries, also had silicon. >> >> >> >> >> On Mon, Nov 28, 2022 at 1:01 PM Kenneth Goodwin < >> kennethgoodwin56(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: >> >>> That must be the 300 B superhive model CPU >>> >>> On Mon, Nov 28, 2022, 1:54 PM William Corcoran &lt;wlc(a)jctaylor.com&gt; >>> wrote: >>> >>>> I have a 3b2/300. Anytime you run a command that is compute bound, >>>> like factoring a large prime number, the CPU buzzes! >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> Bill Corcoran >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> On Nov 27, 2022, at 9:52 AM, John P. Linderman &lt;jpl.jpl(a)gmail.com&gt; >>>> wrote: >>>> >>>>  >>>> >>>> [EXTERNAL] >>>> >>>> >>>> We were "gifted" a 3B2, as in "take this and use it!". I ran a "ps" >>>> command in single user mode, and it took 20 seconds to run. >>>> Our machine names were themed around bird names, so we christened the >>>> 3B2 "junco". Our director said we had to get along, >>>> so we renamed it "jay". But everyone knew what the J stood for. The >>>> 3B2 served as a doorstop. >>>> >>>> On Sat, Nov 26, 2022 at 11:44 PM Phil Budne &lt;phil(a)ultimate.com&gt; wrote: >>>> >>>>> Larry McVoy wrote: >>>>> > I read the Wikipedia page on the 9000. It's sad that the 9000 >>>>> > wasn't cancelled when they had better alternatives. >>>>> >>>>> In an oral history Bob Supnik described Ken Olsen couldn't get his >>>>> head around the fact that the NVAX chip could equal the 9000: >>>>> >>>>> @2:59:45 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3tcCBHRIfU >>>>> >>>>> In part 2, Bob described how then DEC VP Gordon Bell having earlier >>>>> predicted when the microprocessor performance curve would cross over >>>>> minis and mainframes: >>>>> >>>>> @1:51:45 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3tcCBHRIfU >>>>> >>>>> He also talks about how the company couldn't command the bsame gross >>>>> margins as it did in the VAX era. >>>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> THIS IS AN EXTERNAL EMAIL -- This email was sent from someone OUTSIDE >>>> of the NSM Insurance Group email system. PLEASE USE CAUTION WHEN REVIEWING >>>> THIS EMAIL. >>>> >>>>

i was working at building 5 at murray hill in system V development land when the first 3B20 arrived. the first order of business? running off to the local Sears store to buy 4 car batteries so it could power up. what a hoot!

3B20D's that were used for cellular switches used DMERT. I worked for McCaw Cellular (Cellular One) in mid-late 80's. They had several AT&T switches. The monitoring and management system at the NOC in Seattle was developed by BL (I think it was Indian Hill). It was called MFOS and ran on 3B2-400s and used Datakits for networking.

umm, we were porting System V to it. which was modestly straight forward. as Skip remarked, the duplex versions (3B20D) ran DMERT, but singular 3B20’s were also common, and the plan was for them to run System V. (as far as i can recall; this was around 1982 or so.)