Ridge 32/330 up and running!

On 03/29/2015 07:53 PM, Josh Dersch wrote: For the reasons I abandoned the project in about 1982, I am afraid it will stay abandoned. I did get it working, but it is just a bare 32-bit bit slice engine, with 1K 96-bit words of control store and 56 32-bit registers. It ran at 8 MHz for 2-register operations, but could also do 3-register at 6 MHz. It was controlled by an S-100 Z-80 system that I no longer have, although it basically was similar to a parallel port, so could be hooked to a PC parallel port fairly easily. I needed to add in some more logic to do 256-way branches instruction register. I needed to define a system bus and build a bus interface, and them build a few simple peripherals. I already had a SASI-bus hard drive on the S-100 CP/M system, so I could have built a controller for that pretty easily. Then a COM controller. I had planned on making a stripped-down micro-controller for most peripheral controllers, it would have been about 20 chips, with 8-bit data path and 16-bits of EPROM for firmware. Probably could have run at 4 MHz or so. THEN, the REAL reason I let this drop, is I would need an OS for a seriously oddball machine. Slightly enhanced 360 instruction set, but a PDP-11 style I/O architecture. I could build my own OS, but it would likely not be much better than CP/M, although multiprogramming would be nice. Then, how about compilers? I recently figured out I probably could have stolen OS/360 compilers without much trouble, but even getting those working would take a LOT of work to understand the various library routines they used and providing wrappers so the compilers thought they were in an OS/360 environment. Geez, a LOT of work! This would have been an AWESOME home system in 1984 or so, but would be just a ridiculous conversation piece, now. I cloned a Nat. Semi. 32016 system, and used that for a while, but it was glacially slow! Then, I got a uVAX at home, and ran it for 21 years. I still have the CPU, but mostly gave away the peripheral boards. Jon