[TUHS] Early Linux and BSD (was: On the origins of Linux - "an academic question")

Jon Steinhart jon at fourwinds.com
Tue Jan 21 05:46:05 AEST 2020


Clem Cole writes:
>
> On Mon, Jan 20, 2020 at 1:04 PM Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
> > I know those Nat Semi chips very well, or did at the time.  I so wanted to
> > love those chips, the instruction set felt like whoever did the PDP-11
> > did the 320xx chips.
>
> It was clear, the NS folks, like the Moto folk, knew the PDP-11 and VAX.
>  It was a nice architecture and should been a win but...
>
> > But they couldn't produce chips without bugs and that killed them.
>
> I really think it was they were the third man and too late.   Between Apple
> on the Mac and Apollo, Masscomp and eventually Sun, the 68000 and later
> 68010 had volume.   8086 family had volume with the PC.
>
> As Jon can tell you, Tektronix decided the use the NS chip and tossed a
> working 68000/68010 design (Magnolia - which would later ship at 4400) for
> a completely new workstation.  But it meant starting from scratch.   Big
> mistake...
>
> If they had just shipped Magnolia at the beginning, I'm not sure either
> Masscomp or Sun would have been birthed.   Apollo and Triple-Drip were
> already there, but thy would have had the first UNIX workstation on the
> market, with a super graphics system.  Sigh....
>
> > It's a crying shame, I liked the instruction set
> > WAY better than the VAX.  The VAX seemed really messing compared to
> > the PDP-11, the 320xx chips seemed clean.  Might be rose colored
> > glasses but that's my memory.
>
> I would not say way better, but much cleaner.  To DEC's credit, the idea of
> the VAX was to take the PDP-11 forward and keep things running.   Funny, DG
> did that better in the end, but that was the idea at least.   NS was trying
> to make the VAX without the rough edges, mistakes DEC had made.  Prof. Yale
> Patt consulted on both Instructions sets BTW, which may be why they look so
> similar.

I remember it slightly differently than Clem, but close.  The Magnolia wasn't
a UNIX workstation, it was an experimental Smalltalk machine.  I don't recall
much about it, but I don't think that it had to address many of the problems
that UNIX had at the time with the 68000 such as the lack of a MMU.  I think
that the Magnolia predated the 68010 and certainly predated the 68020 and
awful but usable PMMU.  There were also many political issues because by this
time the legacy of Howard Vollum had departed Tektronix and it was starting to
die the slow death of a poorly managed company being looted by top management
which has become all too common since.  But at least Tek lead in something!

Part of the issue was that the Magnolia was developed in Tek Labs, which was
the research end of things.  It wasn't a product organization, the Magnolia
at the time hadn't gone through any of the rigorous environmental testing
required by Tek which was a company that actually provided warranty service.
And there was no marketing, not that Tek was a marketing powerhouse.  Given
the way that things panned out I don't think that the Magnolia would have been
a player once things like Suns appeared, if for no other reason that Tek had no
clue as to how to do anything in volume and our stuff was way too expensive.

The 32032 made sense for the workstation division based on the data sheets.
But, it turned out to be extremely buggy, and unlike the 68K I don't recall
the ability to look at and patch the state of the microcode.

In any case, while the 32032 was a problem, the real reason that Tek failed
in the workstation biz was management.  What happened was that programmable
instrumentation was becoming a thing.  Every instrument group in the company
was building their own "controller" for instrument programming.  In a rare
case of good decision-making it was decided that a single group would build
a controller that everyone else would use; this was the workstation division.
But, this took the most fun thing away from all of the other groups.  They
way that management structured things, instrument groups have to use the
workstation unless it was missing something that they required.  The result
was that the workstation had to meet the union of all requirements, real or
imagined.  The I/O board in this thing had like 4 GPIB ports, 24 RS-232 ports,
8 RS-422 ports (I don't remember the exact number), and so on, making it more
expensive than anybody else's CPU board.  Of course, when the IBM PC came along
all of the instrument groups said "well, we have 2 RS-232 ports and a parallel
port and so we'll work with that."  Had management said that the workstation
group could do what was reasonable and that everyone would have to adapt and
use it we could have parallel groups competing on 32K and 68K designs.

Jon


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