rarest computers. was: RE: Xerox Alto Restoration + Emulation

Actually, there were some other machines between the 6132 and the XD88. These machines were the 4300-series, like the 4319. The 4300-Series machines I believe used 68020's, IIRC. I have a 4319 around here somewhere -- I think it still runs. These also ran UTEK. I worked at Tek during the days of ECS (Engineering Computing Systems). There were a lot of VERY talented people there. Early on, sometime in the late 1970's, Tek developed a very interesting machine called Magnolia. It was never productized to my knowledge, as there were all kinds of problems getting senior management of an oscilloscope and test equipment company to buy into the idea of making a computer. The Magnolia used a custom bit-slice CPU that was very fast for the time. It had an amazing display processor also. The machine was built into a pedastal that a 19" or so raster display sat on top of. It used solid-state main memory, and a Micropolis 8" hard disk mounted in the bottom of the base. It ran Smalltalk, with a completely in-house developed windowing desktop environment, reminiscent of the Xerox PARC implementations. Tek made quite a few of these machines that were used in-house to develop on. The project was eventually cancelled. Don't know what happened to the machines that were in existence at the time. I'd be surprized if any still exist today. Early on at Tek, there was a lot of PDP-8's running OS-8, and PDP-11's running RT11 and RSX as test system controllers, and even one system called the "DPO", which was a digitizer interfaced to a PDP-11 (not user which, probably a /35) that had a Tek DVST terminal hooked up to it. DPO stood for "Digital Processing Oscilloscope". They made a dialect of BASIC that had primitives in it for doing signal processing on acquired signals. It was a BIG piece of equipment, but could do some amazing signal capture and analysis for the time. I think that the DPO ran RT-11, if I remember correctly. Later, Tek developed a microprocessor development system that utilized an LSI-11 core. It was called the 8250. The 8250 used an 8" Micropolis drive, and ran a modified AT&T System III Unix operating system. This was all done under the microprocessor development products group (MDP). These machines provided a basis by which Unix gained a foothold in the company. Then, ECS was formed at the Tek Wilsonville plant. Their idea of what they were building was a workstation-class UNIX machine that'd blow the socks off of everyting out there. However, the politics of the situation was that management expected them to build an instrument controller for automated test environments. The result was the 6130, which was rather weak as a workstation (no display subsystem, only RS-232 serial to a terminal), but worked nicely as an instrument controller with its built-in GPIB (IEEE-488) interface. Attempts were made to develop a display subsystem for the machine...a big daughter board that plugged in on-top of the main CPU board. Prototypes were built, and mods to UTEK were made to support it, and even a primitive window system was developed. However, Tek's instrument mentality wouldn't let the project continue, and it was cancelled. The 4132 follow-on to the 6130 was done mainly because of the proliferation of SCSI. The 6130 used ST-506 disks (though a SCSI add-on board was available), which were starting to become less popular. The 4132 replaced the ST-506 interface with an integrated SCSI controller, and replaced the floppy disc drive with a SCSI 1/4" streaming cartridge tape drive. This made OS loading a LOT faster. To load the OS on the 6130, you had to load a big stack of floppies! The 4132 didn't have a video system, just RS-232 ports for console communications. Then the 43xx workstations came out. These were true Unix workstations, running a new version of Utek, with a full X-Windows implementation and a decent display processor. They were quite capable machines for their time. The 4315 was marketed as an "AI workstation" with a smalltalk environment. The 4319 was a higher-end Unix workstation, inteded for CAD and software development. The last hurrah for ECS was the XD88. There were MASSIVE arguments internally about what CPU to use. There was talk of the Z8000, but eventually the Motorola 88000 won out. The XD88's were really powerful machines, designed chiefly for electrical and mechanical CAD design. Sadly, Tektronix never really figured out that it had the capacity to build nice computers. The instrumentation and terminals mentality of the company kept the thinking limited to these areas. Sales folks had a hard time relating to the concept of a computer workstation. A lot of money and effort was expended to put Tektronix on the map in the computer biz. But, in the end, it was all for naught. ECS was disbanded. Some of the folks left to form other local computer companies, including BIIN among others. All from memory, there may be some errors. -Rick Had Tek developed the Magnolia and started selling it as a real workstation.