24 Apr
2016
24 Apr
'16
10:51 p.m.
On Thursday, April 21, 2016 9:22 AM, "Tapley, Mark" <mtapley at swri.edu>
wrote:
On Apr 20, 2016, at 9:46 PM, dwight <dkelvey at hotmail.com> wrote:
The RTX-2000 was an of shoot of the NC4000. Even at
10MHz, they could
out compute a 40MHz 80386.
One execution per clock cycle plus possibly using 3 16 bit busses in a single
cycle.
A 4MHz NC4000 could sort 1K 16 bit values in 19.7 milliseconds.
Dwight
?.
On 2016-04-20 1:28 PM, dwight wrote:
(top-post ?. bottom-post ?. AAagh!) :-)
The Harris RTX-2010, in a rad-hard version, was for years the CPU of choice for spacecraft
science instruments from Johns Hopkins APL. Those chips are *all* *over* the solar system!
One of APL's lead SW engineers wrote one of the most widely-used Forth test suites,
partly for that reason.
It?s a pretty nice chip, for multiple reasons.
??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? - Mark
This chip was also used in some industrial equipment. ?In school, I worked with an MRI
system that used this chip for the controller. ?It was programmed in a C-like language
using a C-to-FORTH compiler. ?I used to have a manual for the RTX-2000, but sent it off to
someone on comp.lang.forth to scan. ?I wonder if it ever got scanned and placed on the
net.
Come to think of it, I think I have one of these chips lying around, but no software. ?I
think MPE still supports this chip with their forth compiler system, but it's
expensive. ? I wonder if anyone has anything non-commercial that would run on it.
Dave
There was a Harris RTX-2000 based accelerator
card around
the 80386 time period.
...Interestingly: "The RTX 2000 is specifically designed to execute the
Forth language"
(https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/stack_computers/sec4_5.html)
--Toby