[TUHS] C from 1980 binaries

[Clem Cole via TUHS]

The 8510/A was basically an LSI-11 with some graphics hardware, released in
1977.  The Terak was arguably the world’s first true standalone graphics
workstation.

Terak OEM'ed LSI-11 (a KD11-F or maybe the KD11-HA) processor boards from
DEC directly, and this used what DEC officially called the 'LSI-11 BUS ';
but the world calls it by WD's name, the QBUS. So Terak designed a workstation
around DEC's CPU. They built a custom, proprietary chassis, memory system,
8-inch floppy disk controller, and memory-mapped bitmap graphics
framebuffer that sat directly in the PDP-11's I/O space. Because they kept
the core processor a stock DEC LSI-11 and DEC's I/O layout, the Terak
8510/A can run RT-11, Mini-UNIX, and eventually the UCSD p-System. Theses
URL have more details: https://www.threedee.com/jcm/terak/ and Wikipedia: h
ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terak_Corporation
https://www.threedee.com/jcm/terak/

The LSI-11 and the Terak system share an interesting, interrelated history.

I've forgotten many of the details and sales rules to get the chips and the
ROM with the PDP-11-compatible microcode, but WD developed the MCP-1600
chip set and wrote the original microcode (by a real bad-ass programmer
named Duane Dickhut, whom I met a few years later).  Note that WD and DEC
were reasonably tied.   Gordon Bell/DEC had created the UART for the PDP-1,
and in 1971 a small firm originally called General Digital made and
released the first LSI version: the Western Digital WD1402A. Once it was
available, it became the standard DEC UART on serial boards, and their
business relationship began.  As I understand it, in the early 1970s, DEC
management had begun to realize it needed some LSI-based computers to
protect the low end of its market, but lacked internal silicon fabrication
capabilities (DEC Hudson, my future home, was not yet built). So DEC
contracted Western Digital in 1974 to co-develop a chipset (DEC paid
millions of dollars in NRE charges), planning to use it for a number of
systems, starting with the by-then-popular PDP-11 line, but it was getting
pressure in the market from other 16-bit players such as DG and HP who were
selling at lower price points.

At the time, WD was working on the chipset, and DEC had won the lawsuit it
filed against California Data Processors (*a.k.a.* CalData). The results of
that lawsuit were fresh in the eyes of the team at WD  [Ken O'Mohundro and
Fred Cox's firm cloned a number of different ISAs but chose the UNIBUS,
which got them in trouble.  O'Mohundro had famously run the complete 11//40
diagnostics suite for Ken Olson at the National Computer show in CalData's
booth].

As for what was normal for the industry, when Western Digital wanted to
show off the power of their new chipset, they needed to create a reference
design.  I've been told some of the senior folks at WD didn't want to piss
off DEC, which had been a good business partner for years and >>had<<
funded much of the 1600 development.     Using another firm's bus seemed
unwise, so they created a simpler but 'Unibus-Like' multiplexed 16-bit
address/data bus layout.  DEC's engineers later took the original WD bus
design, "refined" (I like to say peed on it to make it more DEC-like), and
formally branded it the LSI-11 Bus.

Roll the clock forward, and Terak comes around.   So they built their
devices for the CPU they had picked and created an early workstation.   I'm
not 100% sure if Ken Bowles and the UCSD team had a real DEC LSI-11 like
the 11/03 as the first target, but at some point they discovered the Tek
8510/A, which, as I understand it, became the 'master system'/gold standard
for the UCSD Pascal system. Their trick was to take the P4 Pascal reference
compiler from Wirth and his students in Europe, reimplement its bytecode
interpreter for a target ISA, expand it a bit, and wrap a development
system around it.  At some point they targeted their interpreter to the
LSI-11 processor, Terak's I/O system, and in particular, its framebuffer.
Since Pascal had by then become the standard teaching language in many
universities, many of them purchased the 8510/A (which I suspect is how
many people learned about them).  You could also get the original p-System
for free from UCSD on 8 floppies or on a distribution tape, and it would
run on something like an LSI-11 with a VT-52 or VT-100 instead of the Terak
if you configured it appropriately; I suspect many universities did that as
well.

In an interesting twist of fate, in 1979, because of the academic success
of the UCSD p-System running on top of their own silicon (via DEC's LSI-11
p-code interpreter), Western Digital's engineers and management saw an
opportunity, thinking: *“Why use an interpreter to translate p-code into
PDP-11 code? Let's just burn the p-code interpreter directly into the
microcode.”  *The result was the WD/9000.  I know it had new microcode, but
I think they also updated and replaced the control-chip portion of their
chipset family.

Of course, by late 1979, Motorola had released the 68000 and the age of
UNIX workstations had begun, and I think the Western Digital Pascal System
was doomed and the 16-bit nature of the PDP-11 killed the Terak.



On Sun, Nov 1, 2026 at 10:06 AM Jeffrey Joshua Rollin via TUHS <
tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

> I have never heard of Teraks.
>
> Sounds like an alien species from Star Trek!
>
> (I'm of a similar vintage to Dan Cross and am familiar with such things as
> the separate ports to the 32-bit Interdata machines, although the closest I
> have gotten to a minicomputer is, depending on your perspective, either
> using the University library computer terminals which, I later found out,
> were connected to a VAX of some sort, or occasionally entertaining the idea
> of buying a PiDP.)
>
> Jeff
>
> On Sun, 1 Nov 2026, 14:55 Larry McVoy via TUHS, <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
>
> > On Sat, Oct 31, 2026 at 10:30:22PM -0500, John Foust via TUHS wrote:
> > > At 12:36 PM 10/31/2026, James Frew via TUHS wrote:
> > > >Back in The Day? I was responsible for a CS student lab full of
> Teraks,
> > >
> > > Yes, that was the situation when I was an undergrad at UW-Madison in
> '81
> > > and that's why I baby-duck imprinted on it and still have ten or so
> > Teraks.
> >
> > I was there too but not in CS yet.  I was undergrad '80-85, grad '86-87.
> > It took me a while to get to CS, I started as an accounting major because
> > my high school coach was also my accounting teacher, so I excelled in
> high
> > school accounting because, well, coach.  College accounting without my
> > coach quickly taught me I hated accounting, still do.  I then, much to my
> > culture vulture father's surprise, drifted into Art History.  Got good
> > enough in Greek pottery that I pointed out a dating error in Janson.
> > My dad was a physics prof there, he started taking art history classes
> > with me.  I became friends with the dean, we'd go out drinking together.
> > He eventually told me "Larry, you are one of the best students I've had,
> > but unless you are willing to do a PhD, there are no jobs, and even then,
> > you'll be in a long line of people for every job".
> >
> > So I went to my dad and said "what do I do?"  He gave me some very good
> > advice.  He said "It doesn't matter.  Well, you can't pick something
> > that goes against your grain like accounting, you have to pick something
> > you like.  When you do, learning becomes its own reward".  So while I
> > had been drifting around, I had taken a bunch of STEM classes, calc,
> > diffie q, physics (all the easy stuff, I got to quantum mechanics and
> > bowed out, just couldn't wrap my head around probability being the
> basis).
> > And some CS classes.  The data structures course in Pascal resonated with
> > me and I got an A in that.  So I picked that.  It worked out well for me.
> >
> > All that is to say, John, I don't remember Teraks.  I definately remember
> > the terminal room with ~40 terminals hooked up to a VAX 780 (and I
> > fondly remember slovax that had the BSD source on it, I got an account
> > on there eventually and spent a lot of time reading.  Ever since then,
> > my main machine has been slovax.  slovax is mcvoy.com).
> >
> > So where were the Teraks?  I probably got serious in CS around
> > 1982 or 83.  Were they still somewhere?
> >
> > --lm
> >
>