Re: Stride computers, was Re: Rod Coleman's personal history of founding, building & running SAGE
On 2021-01-03 05:18, Jos Dreesen via cctalk wrote: Hello Jos, I saw on a German web, that you're planing on a SAGE II remake? Still toying with it? Cheers
Re: Rod Coleman's personal history of founding, building & running SAGE
mån 2021-01-04 klockan 16:38 +0100 skrev Liam Proven via cctalk: > > The Sinclair QL was arguably the first affordable mass-market 68K > box, > and it used the somewhat crippled 68008 and 8-bit RAM to keep costs > down. > The veird machine is the Luxor ABC 1600 computer. It was a test from them together with a consulting firm to design and sell a UNIX based system (an version of Sys III if i'm not wrong) using an MC 68008 but with a A4 portrait monitor. The weird thing: why did they try to use a crippled processor (but it gave them cheaper peripherals) but a fairly expensive graphical subsystem with monitor Have and Have nots... See http://www.datormuseum.se/computers/luxor/abc1600 and yes it is Mattis Lind together with his father Rune who run this little museum.
Re: Rod Coleman's personal history of founding, building & running SAGE
> On Jan 4, 2021, at 11:00 AM, emanuel stiebler via cctalk > wrote: > > On 2021-01-02 22:34, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: >> On Sat, 2 Jan 2021, Liam via cctalk wrote: >>> I'm not really familiar with SAGE machines. They were not as >>> well-known in the UK, I think, being upmarket from the Apple ][ and >>> IBM PC, both of which were eye-wateringly expensive by UK standards of >>> the time. >> >> Possibly, they weren't aimed at the same target audience. >> >> Perhaps they were intended more to compete with machines such as PDP-11, >> rather than Apple][ and IBM PC. > > I was working 1981 with pdp11s and VAX780. Then I heard/read about the > 68000, had to have one of those. Simple programming model, flat address > space and really good performance. Signed up at a startup in Germany in > 1982, had a lot of fun with all of them(68000, '10, '20, '30, '40). We > basically only sold to research/labs. I was at DEC at the time, and I remember discussions around the office saying "this is a VAX on a chip". The instruction set made it feel that way. Not long after that, Apollo Computer was founded to build workstations using the 68000. They found out the hard way it is NOT a VAX on a chip. The key design error is that the 68000 had page access aborts, not page faults -- they weren't restartable so you could not create virtual memory using its page access flags. That mistake was fixed in the 68010. I vaguely remember that Apollo worked around the issue by using a pair of 68000 chips running one cycle apart, so when the abort hit on the lead one you could stop the trailing one and fake a restartable page fault. Some years later I wrote the fast packet handling code of the DECbridge 900 (?) -- FDDI to 6 Ethernet ports. That used a 68040 at 25 MHz, and with careful design it could process a packet every 8 microseconds (12 microseconds if the destination address wasn't in the address cache CAM). One trick was a memory system that did some operations on the rising edge and some on the falling edge, i.e., effectively a "2.5 cycle" access. The other (mine) was to use the fact that the 68040 had a "RISC subset" of instructions and addressing modes that would run in one or two cycles, while the other instructions took MUCH longer. By sticking to handwritten assembly language in the RISC subset I could make it go very fast. It also required awareness of oddities like the fact that branch-taken is faster than branch-not-taken, the opposite of pretty much every other computer. paul
Re: Rod Coleman's personal history of founding, building & running SAGE
On 1/4/2021 10:26 AM, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote: On Mon, 4 Jan 2021 at 17:42, Bill Degnan wrote: Agreed. A fully provisioned IBM PC / XT in 1981-4 was pretty expensive too, that's why 8-bit machines continued to sell well into the later 80's. 16-bit was overkill for most home needs. Apple would not have survived the 80's without their 8-bit machine sales, and Commodore, Atari, Tandy Definitely true. And one thing that interests me is the double factoid: [1] The companies that threw away their 8-bit line and did something totally new for their 16-bit lines generally did better, and attempts at backwards-compatibility failed _except_ [2] For Intel/MICROS~1, who somehow managed to smoothly transition from 8/16 → true 16-bit → 32-bit → 64-bit → multi-CPU → multi-core/multi-CPU, across multiple expansion buses, memory architectures and more... I say IBM is the winner here. IBM 7030 Stretch gave IBM a design based on 8 bit bytes, that followed with the IBM 360. Salesman love bytes because now your 4K of memory (36/48 bits) is 32KB of IBM memory and time sharing because you can FAKE the need for real memory. Ben Fan of 36 bits but not the PDP 10.
Re: Rod Coleman's personal history of founding, building & running SAGE
On Mon, 4 Jan 2021 at 17:42, Bill Degnan wrote: > > Agreed. > > A fully provisioned IBM PC / XT in 1981-4 was pretty expensive too, that's > why 8-bit machines continued to sell well into the later 80's. 16-bit was > overkill for most home needs. Apple would not have survived the 80's without > their 8-bit machine sales, and Commodore, Atari, Tandy Definitely true. And one thing that interests me is the double factoid: [1] The companies that threw away their 8-bit line and did something totally new for their 16-bit lines generally did better, and attempts at backwards-compatibility failed _except_ [2] For Intel/MICROS~1, who somehow managed to smoothly transition from 8/16 → true 16-bit → 32-bit → 64-bit → multi-CPU → multi-core/multi-CPU, across multiple expansion buses, memory architectures and more... -- Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven – Skype: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 – ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
Re: Rod Coleman's personal history of founding, building & running SAGE
> I suppose that the 68K only trickled down to the home/consumer market > after about 5 years. The original Mac was circa $2.5K and the Lisa was > around $10K -- *not* home computer prices for most people, even in the > USA. > > The Sinclair QL was arguably the first affordable mass-market 68K box, > and it used the somewhat crippled 68008 and 8-bit RAM to keep costs > down. > > Before the Mac, I suppose that, as Cameron points out, the accurate > comparison was with standalone multi-user machines such as the Sage > and Alpha Micro. Desktop minicomputers, really. > > Agreed. A fully provisioned IBM PC / XT in 1981-4 was pretty expensive too, that's why 8-bit machines continued to sell well into the later 80's. 16-bit was overkill for most home needs. Apple would not have survived the 80's without their 8-bit machine sales, and Commodore, Atari, Tandy Bill
Re: Rod Coleman's personal history of founding, building & running SAGE
On 2021-01-02 22:34, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: > On Sat, 2 Jan 2021, Liam via cctalk wrote: >> I'm not really familiar with SAGE machines. They were not as >> well-known in the UK, I think, being upmarket from the Apple ][ and >> IBM PC, both of which were eye-wateringly expensive by UK standards of >> the time. > > Possibly, they weren't aimed at the same target audience. > > Perhaps they were intended more to compete with machines such as PDP-11, > rather than Apple][ and IBM PC. I was working 1981 with pdp11s and VAX780. Then I heard/read about the 68000, had to have one of those. Simple programming model, flat address space and really good performance. Signed up at a startup in Germany in 1982, had a lot of fun with all of them(68000, '10, '20, '30, '40). We basically only sold to research/labs. Every time, somebody told us the PC is better, we asked them to run their code on the 68000 and compare themselves. That's how easy it was back than ;-) We ran our own OS, own compilers, and also UCSD Pascal, CPM/68k, APL, coherent Unix ... Was a lot of fun. When I saw the Sage II on a fair, I thought it is a pretty cool machine, but lacking graphics. Still was impressed with their marketing ... Cheers
Re: Rod Coleman's personal history of founding, building & running SAGE
On Mon, 4 Jan 2021 at 15:35, emanuel stiebler wrote: > > I guess we have to be careful, comparing machines & CPUs. > 68000 came out as a CPU in 1980/1981 (available on the market (?)) > > You're comparing it to a ARM2 machine of 1987, where Motorola had the > newer 68020, and 68030 by than ... That's a fair objection. :-) I suppose that the 68K only trickled down to the home/consumer market after about 5 years. The original Mac was circa $2.5K and the Lisa was around $10K -- *not* home computer prices for most people, even in the USA. The Sinclair QL was arguably the first affordable mass-market 68K box, and it used the somewhat crippled 68008 and 8-bit RAM to keep costs down. Before the Mac, I suppose that, as Cameron points out, the accurate comparison was with standalone multi-user machines such as the Sage and Alpha Micro. Desktop minicomputers, really. These were fading from the market when I started my first job in 1988. The only ones I personally worked on were Jarograte Sprite machines -- of which barely a trace remains on the WWW now, sadly. I'd like to know more about Jarogate and their products -- most of what I did was helping migrate stuff _off_ them onto either 386s running SCO Xenix, or small PC LANs. -- Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven – Skype: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 – ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
Re: Rod Coleman's personal history of founding, building & running SAGE
On 2021-01-03 19:08, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote: > On Sun, 3 Jan 2021 at 03:53, Boris Gimbarzevsky > wrote: >> >> Ran into 68000 processor for >> first time in 1986 when my father bought a 512 K >> Mac and couldn't believe performance of this CPU > > It is odd. I had read of it, of course, but for me the revelation was > getting an Acorn Archimedes in 1989, with an 8MHz ARM2, and seeing it > blast past benchmarks of ~8MHz 68K machines such as the Amiga 500 or > Atari 512 ST. It was about 4x faster, I believe. I guess we have to be careful, comparing machines & CPUs. 68000 came out as a CPU in 1980/1981 (available on the market (?)) You're comparing it to a ARM2 machine of 1987, where Motorola had the newer 68020, and 68030 by than ...
Re: Rod Coleman's personal history of founding, building & running SAGE
On Sun, 3 Jan 2021 at 03:53, Boris Gimbarzevsky wrote: > > Ran into 68000 processor for > first time in 1986 when my father bought a 512 K > Mac and couldn't believe performance of this CPU It is odd. I had read of it, of course, but for me the revelation was getting an Acorn Archimedes in 1989, with an 8MHz ARM2, and seeing it blast past benchmarks of ~8MHz 68K machines such as the Amiga 500 or Atari 512 ST. It was about 4x faster, I believe. For me -- being a bit too young for the early days of the 68K family -- it was not a performance chip, but more about its ability to have lots of flat memory, unlike the crippled Intel chips that IBM used. > Weird that Rod Coleman had 68000 > instruction set associated with IBM 370 whereas > to me it was very PDP-11 like I've heard that before, yes,. and never the IBM comparison. I suppose it is a matter of what you're more familiar with. > Thanks for the link as didn't realize 68000 was > used for home systems before I ran into Mac. Sinclair's QL used a 68008 and was launched some weeks before the Mac. Of course Apple's own Lisa was before the Mac, too. Very soon after came the Amiga and ST -- the "Jackintosh", "power without the price." -- Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven – Skype: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 – ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
Re: Stride computers, was Re: Rod Coleman's personal history of founding, building & running SAGE
On 2021-01-03 05:18, Jos Dreesen via cctalk wrote: > On 03.01.21 01:11, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote: >> This may be old news -- it was new to me, though. >> >> https://suddendisruption.blogspot.com/search/label/Booting%20Sage%20Computer >> >> > The story is around for several years already, but yes : interesting > read indeed. > > Speaking of which : Just like to rise my hand, in case anybody likes to get rid of his SAGE II or IV ... or even at a decent price. Have one, but never got it really working :( Cheers
Stride computers, was Re: Rod Coleman's personal history of founding, building & running SAGE
On 03.01.21 01:11, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote: This may be old news -- it was new to me, though. https://suddendisruption.blogspot.com/search/label/Booting%20Sage%20Computer The story is around for several years already, but yes : interesting read indeed. Speaking of which : I am currently restoring 3 Stride 420 machines, the follow-up to the Sage machines. Anyone has CP/M or PSystem IV.2.2 disks for these, and would like to share ? ( I have PSystem IV.2.1 and PDOS ) Also a copy of UniStride, the UNIX-V for the Stride 440 / 460 would be welcome. I would need top reconstruct the MFM controller for UNIX use, but that would not be unsurmountable. Jos
Re: Rod Coleman's personal history of founding, building & running SAGE
Apparently someone wrote: > Thanks for the link as didn't realize 68000 was > used for home systems before I ran into Mac. > The SAGE certainly wasn't a "home system" in the sense that the Macintosh was. I mean, sure, there were undoubtedly a few people that bought one for home use, but it was certainly not at all marketed for that. There were many other pre-Macintosh 68000 systems that were marketed primarily for developer or business use, for example the Sun 1, Corvus Concept, TRS-80 Model 16, Altos ACS 68000, and Fortune 32:16.
Re: Rod Coleman's personal history of founding, building & running SAGE
> Thanks for the link as didn't realize 68000 was > used for home systems before I ran into Mac. Don't forget about Alpha Micro, though they preferred to be in multi-user vertically integrated environments rather than the engineering and personal use SAGE seemed to be targetting. -- personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckai...@floodgap.com -- In memory of Commodore Business Machines (1954-1994) ---
Re: Rod Coleman's personal history of founding, building & running SAGE
On 1/2/2021 7:23 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: On Sat, 2 Jan 2021, Nigel Johnson via cctalk wrote: For one exciting moment there I thought that you were talking about the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment - which a friend of mine was a tech on in North Bay, ON, part of the DEW line! I was getting ready to up stakes and hop off to Philadelphia! Well, perhaps somebody could entertain us by telling us, what differences we might see between the two machines :-) Better blinking lights is my guess for the Original. :) A 32?/36? bit transistor mainframe often only had 15 bits of addressing, the same as 128KB for early 68000 computer's. Who was faster is open for debate, a main frame with mag tape or a 68000 running floppies and 3 users. Ben.
Re: Rod Coleman's personal history of founding, building & running SAGE
On Sat, 2 Jan 2021, Liam via cctalk wrote: I'm not really familiar with SAGE machines. They were not as well-known in the UK, I think, being upmarket from the Apple ][ and IBM PC, both of which were eye-wateringly expensive by UK standards of the time. Possibly, they weren't aimed at the same target audience. Perhaps they were intended more to compete with machines such as PDP-11, rather than Apple][ and IBM PC. I don't think that they were aimed at kids (of all ages) scrounging some money to get a home computer. They were out of my price range, as well. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
Re: Rod Coleman's personal history of founding, building & running SAGE
I also had the opportunity to visit the UGC, but after operations had moved aboveground. The followup to SAGE, the AN/FYQ93 (ROCC, SOCC, JSS) equipment was still in place, but powered down. This was in 2007. I had previously worked on both SAGE and the ROCC at McChord AFB as a computer maintenance tech. On Sat, 2 Jan 2021, Paul Berger via cctalk wrote: North Bay is not on the DEW line the DEW line is above the arctic circle and while North Bay may seem like the far north to some it is a long way below the arctic circle is actually at about the level of the Pine Tree Line. CFB North Bay was the SAGE site for the 22nd NORAD region. The SAGE site was 600 ft under ground in a cavern carved out of solid rock. I had the good fortune of going on a tour of the underground while the AN/FSQ-7 computers where still operating. Paul. On 2021-01-02 10:08 p.m., Nigel Johnson via cctalk wrote: For one exciting moment there I thought that you were talking about the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment - which a friend of mine was a tech on in North Bay, ON, part of the DEW line! I was getting ready to up stakes and hop off to Philadelphia! cheers, Nigel Nigel Johnson, MSc., MIEEE, MCSE VE3ID/G4AJQ/VA3MCU Amateur Radio, the origin of the open-source concept! Skype: TILBURY2591 nw.john...@ieee.org On 2021-01-02 8:44 p.m., Bill Degnan via cctalk wrote: On Sat, Jan 2, 2021, 7:11 PM Liam Proven via cctalk wrote: This may be old news -- it was new to me, though. https://suddendisruption.blogspot.com/search/label/Booting%20Sage%20Computer I'm not really familiar with SAGE machines. They were not as well-known in the UK, I think, being upmarket from the Apple ][ and IBM PC, both of which were eye-wateringly expensive by UK standards of the time. Also, they were terminal-based things and even back then I was interested in boxes with graphics. :-) There is a SAGE II at Kennett Classic. When I give tours I like to compare and contrast the SAGE with the IBM PC, Motorola 68000 vs Intel 8086. If anyone is in the Philadelphia area stop by and we can fire them up. Pascal. Bill Mike Loewen mloe...@cpumagic.scol.pa.us Old Technology http://q7.neurotica.com/Oldtech/
Re: Rod Coleman's personal history of founding, building & running SAGE
North Bay is not on the DEW line the DEW line is above the arctic circle and while North Bay may seem like the far north to some it is a long way below the arctic circle is actually at about the level of the Pine Tree Line. CFB North Bay was the SAGE site for the 22nd NORAD region. The SAGE site was 600 ft under ground in a cavern carved out of solid rock. I had the good fortune of going on a tour of the underground while the AN/FSQ-7 computers where still operating. Paul. On 2021-01-02 10:08 p.m., Nigel Johnson via cctalk wrote: For one exciting moment there I thought that you were talking about the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment - which a friend of mine was a tech on in North Bay, ON, part of the DEW line! I was getting ready to up stakes and hop off to Philadelphia! cheers, Nigel Nigel Johnson, MSc., MIEEE, MCSE VE3ID/G4AJQ/VA3MCU Amateur Radio, the origin of the open-source concept! Skype: TILBURY2591 nw.john...@ieee.org On 2021-01-02 8:44 p.m., Bill Degnan via cctalk wrote: On Sat, Jan 2, 2021, 7:11 PM Liam Proven via cctalk wrote: This may be old news -- it was new to me, though. https://suddendisruption.blogspot.com/search/label/Booting%20Sage%20Computer I'm not really familiar with SAGE machines. They were not as well-known in the UK, I think, being upmarket from the Apple ][ and IBM PC, both of which were eye-wateringly expensive by UK standards of the time. Also, they were terminal-based things and even back then I was interested in boxes with graphics. :-) There is a SAGE II at Kennett Classic. When I give tours I like to compare and contrast the SAGE with the IBM PC, Motorola 68000 vs Intel 8086. If anyone is in the Philadelphia area stop by and we can fire them up. Pascal. Bill
Re: Rod Coleman's personal history of founding, building & running SAGE
Probably read about this machine in Byte back then but was programming PDP-11's. Was very disappointed in IBM PC as IMO was far inferior to PDP-11 which was was easier to interface to data acquisition hardware and had a much nicer instruction set. Ran into 68000 processor for first time in 1986 when my father bought a 512 K Mac and couldn't believe performance of this CPU compared to PDP-11 - 24 bit addressing! and inferior memory access to what Sage had. Also, found 68000 instruction set very similar to PDP-11 and had no trouble writing assembly code for it a few years later and also really liked Apple's debug switch which was best implementation of a debugging system I've thus far run into. Weird that Rod Coleman had 68000 instruction set associated with IBM 370 whereas to me it was very PDP-11 like and 24 bit addressing was a very nice feature (that was one similarity to IBM 360) Other interesting aspect to SAGE history was the influence of September 1966 issue of Scientific American computer issue on Rod Coleman and lots of other people I've talked to. Was so glad that had this issue to read in 1966 and spent most of my time in boring school classes designing logic circuits and then building them at home using discrete DTL logic with parts salvaged from surplus IBM boards. Thanks for the link as didn't realize 68000 was used for home systems before I ran into Mac. This may be old news -- it was new to me, though. https://suddendisruption.blogspot.com/search/label/Booting%20Sage%20Computer I'm not really familiar with SAGE machines. They were not as well-known in the UK, I think, being upmarket from the Apple ][ and IBM PC, both of which were eye-wateringly expensive by UK standards of the time. Also, they were terminal-based things and even back then I was interested in boxes with graphics. :-) -- Liam Proven Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven Skype: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 ÄR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 7002 829 053
Re: Rod Coleman's personal history of founding, building & running SAGE
On Sat, 2 Jan 2021, Nigel Johnson via cctalk wrote: For one exciting moment there I thought that you were talking about the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment - which a friend of mine was a tech on in North Bay, ON, part of the DEW line! I was getting ready to up stakes and hop off to Philadelphia! Well, perhaps somebody could entertain us by telling us, what differences we might see between the two machines :-)
Re: Rod Coleman's personal history of founding, building & running SAGE
For one exciting moment there I thought that you were talking about the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment - which a friend of mine was a tech on in North Bay, ON, part of the DEW line! I was getting ready to up stakes and hop off to Philadelphia! cheers, Nigel Nigel Johnson, MSc., MIEEE, MCSE VE3ID/G4AJQ/VA3MCU Amateur Radio, the origin of the open-source concept! Skype: TILBURY2591 nw.john...@ieee.org On 2021-01-02 8:44 p.m., Bill Degnan via cctalk wrote: > On Sat, Jan 2, 2021, 7:11 PM Liam Proven via cctalk > wrote: > >> This may be old news -- it was new to me, though. >> >> >> https://suddendisruption.blogspot.com/search/label/Booting%20Sage%20Computer >> >> I'm not really familiar with SAGE machines. They were not as >> well-known in the UK, I think, being upmarket from the Apple ][ and >> IBM PC, both of which were eye-wateringly expensive by UK standards of >> the time. >> >> Also, they were terminal-based things and even back then I was >> interested in boxes with graphics. :-) >> > There is a SAGE II at Kennett Classic. When I give tours I like to compare > and contrast the SAGE with the IBM PC, Motorola 68000 vs Intel 8086. > > If anyone is in the Philadelphia area stop by and we can fire them up. > Pascal. > > Bill >
Re: Rod Coleman's personal history of founding, building & running SAGE
On Sat, Jan 2, 2021, 7:11 PM Liam Proven via cctalk wrote: > This may be old news -- it was new to me, though. > > > https://suddendisruption.blogspot.com/search/label/Booting%20Sage%20Computer > > I'm not really familiar with SAGE machines. They were not as > well-known in the UK, I think, being upmarket from the Apple ][ and > IBM PC, both of which were eye-wateringly expensive by UK standards of > the time. > > Also, they were terminal-based things and even back then I was > interested in boxes with graphics. :-) > There is a SAGE II at Kennett Classic. When I give tours I like to compare and contrast the SAGE with the IBM PC, Motorola 68000 vs Intel 8086. If anyone is in the Philadelphia area stop by and we can fire them up. Pascal. Bill >
Rod Coleman's personal history of founding, building & running SAGE
This may be old news -- it was new to me, though. https://suddendisruption.blogspot.com/search/label/Booting%20Sage%20Computer I'm not really familiar with SAGE machines. They were not as well-known in the UK, I think, being upmarket from the Apple ][ and IBM PC, both of which were eye-wateringly expensive by UK standards of the time. Also, they were terminal-based things and even back then I was interested in boxes with graphics. :-) -- Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven – Skype: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 – ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
