19 Nov
2004
19 Nov
'04
11:53 a.m.
Stephane Tsacas <stephane.tsacas(a)gmail.com> wrote:
The Sperry 7000, aka CCI 6/32, Harris HCX/7, Tahoe,
was a nice
machine, AFAIR microcoded architecture, amd2901 based, and with a VAX
like (reduced) instruction set.
Ah yes, the Tahoe of the 4.3BSD-Tahoe fame. It's a VAX knock-off
deliberately modified to not run VAX binaries (particularly VMS), I guess
so that DEC wouldn't sue them. They made it big-endian and reversed the
nibbles in VAX opcodes, and made a few other random changes while they
were at it. Its OS was, you've guessed it, 4.3BSD-Tahoe. It was the
most short-lived architecture in the history of BSD UNIX, introduced
after 4.3BSD and discontinued before 4.4BSD.
Just out of curiousity, does there still exist at least one (1) Tahoe
machine in the world that hasn't been melted down? I'm still carrying
the Tahoe code in the 4.3BSD-Quasijarus source tree, completely unmaintained
and bitrotten, and wondering if it will ever be touched by anyone in the
time between now and the Big Crunch (opposite of Big Bang) in which the
Universe will end.
MS