Tony Duell said:
>BTW, does anyone know the position on reverse-engineered schematics? >Who
owns the copyright on those?
Check out BOMARC SERVICES (http://w3.trib.com/~rollo/bomcat.htm)
Their catalog has 3,000 devices that they have reversed engineered and
sell the schematics for. They usually advertise in Nuts and Volts.
I remember when I was at Tengen in 91 or 92 and we were just getting
started on the Sega Genesis, we sent them one and they sent back the
schematics. It came in real handy, the only programming manual was
xeroxed, handwritten and translated from Japanese (badly).
=========================================
Doug Coward dcoward(a)pressstart.com
Senior Software Engineer
Press Start Inc.
Sunnyvale,CA
Curator
Museum of Personal Computing Machinery
http://www.best.com/~dcoward/museum
=========================================
<> Compared to maybe 6800 or 6502, the 8080 had 4 16bit registers (bc, de,
<> hl, sp). The z80 added a second set and IX/IY. But that was only one
<> aspect.
<
<Oh come on. The 16 bit registers in the Z80 were hardly general-purpose
<in the PDP11 or RISC sense. HL was almost a 16 bit accumulator.
My comment was to point out that most of the micros were not register
poor like the 6800 or 6502 only that they really didn't use them well.
<The ARM was developed as a 32 bit replacement for the 6502 according to
<one rumour (from Acorn, BTW). They didn't like any of the existing 16 or
<32 bit chips, so they designed their own...
I've looked briefly at that chip and it's real simple and straightforward.
Never had a chance to play with one.
<The one instruction per clock cycle definition is daft IMHO. It shouldn't
<matter whether you take a 64MHz clock and have 8 cycles per instruction
<or take an 8MHz clock and derrive other timing signals from it using gate
<delays or a delay line. The throughput is the same. And the critical
<paths have the same timing.
I agree mostly save for at the time that notion was in vogue the maximum
clock rate was circuit limited in NMOS and CMOS devices so fewer clocks
for a cycle equaled greater speed. Most of the RISC proponents of the
time were talking lower transistor counts, clock frequencies, lower
silicon cost and higher testability than their CISC counterparts for the
same overall system performance. The concept was really applicable to
microprocessors as no engineer at the time could even conceive of
injecting clock at 100mhz in to a micro at a time when gate propagation
delays at the silicon level were greater than 10ns. The concept was
appealing when z80s were hitting the wall at 6mhz and 8086s were fast at
10mhz. Of course as Hmos-III and sub 1micron CMOS started to show signs
of going much faster...
Allison
<FWIW, it's been my experience that on problems small enough to be tackle
<by the J-11, an 18MHz J-11 eats the VAX-11/780 for lunch.
The PDP-11 is no slouch. I've used the T-11 part for some things and
even using the pokey 7.5mhz clock some tasks are faster than most
anything contemporary to it like the z80/8mhz even though the numbers
say slower. It's that CISC with superior addressing modes that put it
out ahead.
I've found the same but it's task dependant and also the 780 is always
doing more than the J-11 due to OS. I did get a chance to try that
once and the 780 was running nothing more than the usual background
tasks and it was close but then both are about 1mips. Same was true in
1978 when the 11/70 was put up against the 11/780. The 2vup and faster
VAXen made it a no contest in favor of the VAX though. As soon as the
task exceeds 64k or the user/task load gets up there the differences
start to stretch out with the vax ahead. A faster PDP-11 will always
have that disadvantage.
Allison
Tony Duell wrote:
>The problem with solutions like the quickcam is that, if you're not
>careful, in 10 years time the new version will not work with the hardware
>or OS that you've chosen to run
Just to flog the horse, my point was that my C code will deal with
a bitmap. It doesn't care which technology produces the bitmap:
today's QuickCam, tomorrow's Java Ring, 2010's 3D scanner.
A friend of mine has a joke that goes something like "In ten years
we'll have a wrist computer with the horsepower of today's $5,000
workstation, voice recognition, holographic memory, etc. but there
will still be an obscure way to get back to the C: prompt."
- John
Jefferson Computer Museum <http://www.threedee.com/jcm>
On Apr 23, 14:31, Captain Napalm wrote:
> Subject: Re: Re[2]: Replies to various threads
> It was thus said that the Great Allison J Parent once stated:
> > Now something with a MIPS chip, ARM, sparc or some such would be a
great
> > addition of a real RISC processor.
>
> I think it's the Nintendo-64 that has a MIPS chip in it, and with the
> right peripherals, would make for one killer computer (it's basically an
SGI
> sans keyboard, harddrive and network connection).
The MIPS chip in a Nintendo is a cut-down version of the versions used in
SGI and the Nintendo is a long way from an SGI sans keyboard, harddrive,
etc. I can't remember all the differences now, but I discussed it with SGI
last year when I was looking for a fast CPU for an embedded application.
We have lots of SGIs (of different types) here, so MIPS devices were one
of the obvious things to look at. It's definitely RISC, though :-) The
eventual choice was StrongARM, though the project never got built.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Dept. of Computer Science
University of York
I've added some new sections to the Vintage Computer Festival Web Page:
o The Recent Acquisitions Report lists the latest additions to the VCF
Archives
o You can now receive automatic notification via e-mail whenever a new VCF
announcement is made...be automatically notified when new speakers and
exhibitors are added to the event as well as when the web page is
updated
Sam Alternate e-mail: dastar(a)siconic.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Don't blame me...I voted for Satan.
Coming in September...Vintage Computer Festival 2.0
See http://www.siconic.com/vcf for details!
[Last web page update: 04/23/98]
If you find out who buys it at this price I have another one I'm willing to
let go for $1000;)
Francois
-------------------------------------------------------------
Visit the Sanctuary at: http://www.pclink.com/fauradon
-----Original Message-----
From: Sam Ismail <dastar(a)wco.com>
To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
<classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu>
Date: Thursday, April 23, 1998 2:55 PM
Subject: Osborne 1 for $1000?
>
>Anyone want to buy an Osborne 1 for $1000? Didn't think so. However, if
> Glad to have you back. (I was wondering where the heck you were.)
> Tim D. Hotze
Thanks. I had a buncha work, then both my desktop and laptop suffered
problems.
btw, did you still need those drives? I turned up a couple of ST-157's (40
MB), but I don't know of they work. Yet.
manney(a)lrbcg.com
No, I need the paint program itself -- or any apple paint program.
Manney
>>Does anyone have the disks for the paint program that came with the Apple
>>Koala pad?
