16 Sep
2020
16 Sep
'20
11:29 a.m.
I believe it was a performance issue. The APL was so slow without the
microcode assist that the system was unusable.
Lee C.
On Wed, Sep 16, 2020 at 8:22 AM Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:
On Wed, Sep 16, 2020 at 9:19 AM Lee Courtney via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
--
Lee Courtney
+1-650-704-3934 cell
"Was Lee Courtney involved with the APL 3000
project?" - unfortunately no
I
was not. Just RTE on the 1000 and later MPE on PA-RISC. All I know is that
there was microcode support required to run APL on Series II/III
micro-architecture machines. That microcode was not moved to later
micro-architectures (Series 3x, 4x, 6x, 7x) so there was no APL available.
I don't think HP had enough customers using APL to justify the effort. Too
bad because was an innovative APL.
Why was microcode support required to make APL work? What did it enable
that couldn't be done in other ways?
Thanks!
Warner
Stan Sieler et al are trying to get APL\3000 up
and running on an emulated
3000 via SIMH. He's CC'd here and can comment.
Al - it would be a Very Good Thing to get those APL ROMS dumped when
possible.
Lee Courtney
On Wed, Sep 16, 2020 at 6:04 AM Al Kossow via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org>
wrote:
On 9/16/20 5:30 AM, Rodney Brown via cctalk
wrote:
HP
It's possible that one of the SYSWCS64 files
may match the assembly
listing on bitsavers, but that listing could allow guessing
the
> architecture, assuming horizontal microcode and matching against the 3000 stack machine instruction set it
implements.
I suspect the listing is for this machine
https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102691253
I remember looking at the microcode boards in it at one point, and it
had
APL roms
Attempting to dump them isn't possible right now.
Was Lee Courtney involved with the APL 3000 project?
--
Lee Courtney
+1-650-704-3934 cell