Fujitsu HALstation 330

Hi I used to work at HaL. I don't have any of the stuff you need but I'll ask around. It is funny that when working on some of the machines made by other people I can't understand why they didn't save some of the information for future use. Here I was working there and I don't think I saved anything. The HaL boxes were the first Sparc64's. Still they did take a specialized OS. This was mainly for the I/O drivers. The processors used in the early machines were some of the first to use such things as out of order execution. Basically, the processor would prefetch a number of instructions ahead of time. If it saw an instruction that didn't seem to have dependencies on previous results that might not be available yet, it would execute them to fill, otherwise, dead processor time. This was fine for most everything but I/O and some process handshake in multitasked. Someone forgot the I/O problem. I/O that needed to be ordered had to have enough 'nop's inline so that the next I/O was not in the prefetch. This required special I/O routines, even though the machines were otherwise compatible with other Sun code. I don't even recall if the 330 was a R1 or a R2 processor. I guess I can't blame others for losing computer history when I'm part of the problem. I guess we should all make efforts to save information as we go along. The hard part is to recognize when we are at a significant point in time. Dwight