PDP era and a question

please see my embedded comments below. Dick -----Original Message----- From: Tony Duell <ard(a)p850ug1.demon.co.uk> To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers <classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu> Date: Saturday, August 28, 1999 11:27 AM Subject: Re: PDP era and a question and Unfortunately, your desire to do that is in the toiled right along with the manufacturers' competitors' wish to learn what changes were made in order to field the last batch of "enhancements." Their perception is that too much detail about the parts' configuration details is too much detail about the inner workings of their product. It's their intellectual property, so if they wish to be able to protect it in court when someone steals is by whatever means, they have to show they've applied due dilligence throughout their operation to protect that information. If they don't, they run the risk that a competitor's lawyer will say, in court, that this information was not valuable enough to protect in the one instance, so why are they upset that someone acquired it through other means. It's a valid point. That's why many vendors don't give "free" copies of software anymore. The courts have found that if your product is valuable enough to prosecute someone for "stealing" it, then it should be so valuable that it can't be given away. Now, I'm not sure I buy all that, but that's the direction things seem to run. configuration. Not all vendors will give you all the necessary information to do that. Most makers of microcontrollers will, though. >Most (all?) of the existing work on such systems was done using the >now-discontinued Xilinx XC6200 series. Those were fully documented (I >have the data sheets). >[...] > >> >There was a _supplied_ program that would take a configuration bitstream >> >and turn it back into a CLB + interconnect map - essentially a >> >disassembler. Of course turning that map into a schematic was a lot of >> >work, but the 'secret' part was there. >> > >> >But no way would they tell us what any of the bits in the configuration >> >file actually meant. >> > >> >I am told they might have supplied some documentation under an NDA, but >> >that's no use for open-source software, of course. >> > >> Well, it's not likely that you'll encounter much cooperation in your effort of if Back in the early '80's I found that dirt simple. I can remember many a trade-show where my partner would, after we had examined a new product, buy me a cup of coffee and hand me a couple of extra napkins so I could draw a schematic of what I perceived the "new" product to be. Knowing how things worked and what the various TTL parts did made that into child's play. As a result, our products were almost always "better" than theirs. > >Any changes in the internals of the part (as it appears to the user - say >extra interconnect resources) were clearly visible using these tools and >were (IIRC) documented in the data sheets. As I said above, the data >sheets I have are reasonably details on what the chip contains and how it >works, but don't give the information to actually use it. >> Nevertheless, perhaps you need to back away from your devotion to the >> absolute notion of fully open source in favor of a really efficient, >> particularly cost-efficient, PDP whatever you want to build. If you need to You'd only do that if you intended to make your version better, faster, and less costly, along with less trouble to repair. the Well, if you're getting paid on time and materials, then it's someone else's worry, isn't it, if they specify a device with buggy software support. If you have your way, you specify a product which doesn't have those problems. with Perhaps that has more than anything else to do with your inability to find work. If you're so prone to get caught up in "fixing" what others don't even perceive to be broken, that you can't work with those tools, perhaps it's your outlook that needs fixing. In any case, perhaps a look in your own closet is warranted. I know I wouldn't hire someone who was not at all concerned about protecting intellectual property I had bought and paid for and who felt that it was more important to make a board easy to clone that it was to make it lower in cost and more reliable. Don't you think your outlook has some questionable perspective issues? If you're an engineer, your job is to solve the problems which confront you today with the resources at your disposal today, and not to lament the fact that someone built the XYZ round instead of square so it would stack neatly, and not to dream up technology which isn't yet commercially viable. Today's software isn't bug free, nor is it "open" enough to suit you. That is what's on the table, though. Refusing to use current hardware/software because it's not "open" enough isn't going to put a roast on the dinner table next Sunday, either. Maybe your talents would be better spent figuring out a better way to do what "the boss" wants, rather than trying to figure out a better thing to do. It's pretty apparent you have a good understanding of how the things work. It's also apparent you're capable of making the necessary leap. If you figure out a better way to do something on one of those computers you don't want with that OS you dislike, and sell it to .001% of all the users out there, you'll be wealthy beyond your wildest dreams. (You'll also develop different priorities where intellectual property is concerned!) OTOH, if you make an improvement to all the PDP-anythings still in use out there and sell it for 10x what it's worth, you'll still be as poor as ever. (well . . . maybe not poor . . . but the tax collector still won't remember you by name.) I haven't seen an FPGA (yet) which has "soft" configuration which can be changed on the fly. I think Triscend (www.triscend.com) may be heading in that direction, together with their 805x core. I've read a little about it, but as far as I know, the way to change it is to reset and reload the part, perhaps from a different configuration file. One thing I find shameful about the FPGA makers is that they have all this secrecy about one aspect or another of THEIR intellectual property as pertains to their parts, yet they do absolutely nothing to protect YOUR IP as it sits in a completely visible medium. If they would at least provide a feature to allow you to flash in a persistent encryption circuit not detectable from the outside but permanently associated with a given design . . .