23 Jan
2008
23 Jan
'08
6:24 p.m.
In Aug, 2004, Jim Battle wrote:
Speaking of core memory, I used to work for a company
that was still
shipping core-based systems in 1985, when I first joined them right out
of college.
The machine was the "BTI 8000", made by BTI Computer Systems, based in
Sunnyvale, CA. I worked there for only a year, but I have some
recollection of the machine.
I turned up a brochure and technical summary last night, scans up under
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/bti
23 Jan
23 Jan
7:10 p.m.
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Al Kossow wrote:
| I turned up a brochure and technical summary last night, scans up under
| http://bitsavers.org/pdf/bti
Oh man, is that a blast from the past. Of course the system as it
existed in 1978 was nothing like what is described in the glossies with
much of the I/O still being handled by the BTI 5000 emulator that hung
off the side.
All in all it was a pretty cool machine, even if it was one giant
example of second system syndrome.
- --
Chris Kennedy
chris at mainecoon.com AF6AP/AFA6KY
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10:20 p.m.
In article <4797911F.4040405 at mainecoon.com>,
Chris Kennedy <chris at mainecoon.com> writes:
Oh man, is that a blast from the past. Of course the
system as it
existed in 1978 was nothing like what is described in the glossies with
much of the I/O still being handled by the BTI 5000 emulator that hung
off the side.
Chris,
Did you ever use one of those funky video display plus typewriter
terminals shown in the brochure?
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24 Jan
24 Jan
1:50 a.m.
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Richard wrote:
| Did you ever use one of those funky video display plus typewriter
| terminals shown in the brochure?
Not once, in fact I don't recall ever even seeing such a beast. You
were doing good in Engineering if you managed to score an Omron terminal.
Then again, our 8000 didn't even have skins on it most of the time. The
things in those photos are far too pretty for them to have ever let
engineers near; I don't think they trusted us to wipe our feet :)
- --
Chris Kennedy
chris at mainecoon.com AF6AP
http://www.mainecoon.com PGP KeyID 108DAB97
PGP fingerprint: 4E99 10B6 7253 B048 6685 6CBC 55E1 20A3 108D AB97
"Mr. McKittrick, after careful consideration..."
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23 Jan
23 Jan
8:16 p.m.
In article <4797865B.8010704 at bitsavers.org>,
Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> writes:
I turned up a brochure and technical summary last
night, scans up under
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/bti
Damn! Look at those incedibly funky terminals on the left hand side
of page 3:
<http://bitsavers.org/pdf/bti/BTI_8000_Brochure_1978.pdf>
It looks like a video tube mounted on a base *above* a selectric
typewriter!
I also don't recognize the terminals in the bottom right of that same
page, but they look like much more ordinary video display terminals.
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<http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html>
Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>
24 Jan
24 Jan
5:46 p.m.
Al Kossow wrote:
In Aug, 2004, Jim Battle wrote:
That is a great find! Thanks for posting it.
A few months back I made contact with the the guy who was the lead of
the software group at BTI. He said he'd check around to see what docs
he had, but he didn't get back to me. I'll ping him again and point to
your directory so he gets the idea that there would be a good home for
this information.
A while back I bought the AFIPS 79 proceedings as there is an article in
it where BTI describes some features of their architecture. However, I
don't dare scan and post the article as IEEE still actively protects its
copyrights. If the CHM could ask the IEEE for permission to post that
one article, I'd happily scan it and forward it to you.
Speaking of core memory, I used to work for a
company that was still
shipping core-based systems in 1985, when I first joined them right out
of college.
The machine was the "BTI 8000", made by BTI Computer Systems, based in
Sunnyvale, CA. I worked there for only a year, but I have some
recollection of the machine.
I turned up a brochure and technical summary last night, scans up under
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/bti
6:01 p.m.
Jim Battle wrote:
A few months back I made contact with the the guy who
was the lead of
the software group at BTI.
Which one? We always seemed to have like four :)
Has anyone tried pinging Jimbo to see if he has any stuff hanging about?
Pity he never implemented Intercal for the 8000. It could have been a
real competitor for Dragon ;)
--
Chris Kennedy
chris at mainecoon.com AF6AP
http://www.mainecoon.com PGP KeyID 108DAB97
PGP fingerprint: 4E99 10B6 7253 B048 6685 6CBC 55E1 20A3 108D AB97
"Mr. McKittrick, after careful consideration..."
6:40 p.m.
Chris Kennedy wrote:
Jim Battle wrote:
Ron Crandall. When I was at BTI (1985-1986) Ron was the only main SW guy.
When I talked with Ron, he said Tom Poulter (founder of BTI, and
previously the product manager of the HP 2000, I believe) still had two
8000s and docs and media. Ron said he'd contact Tom for me, but I never
heard anything back.
A few months back I made contact with the the guy
who was the lead of
the software group at BTI.
Which one? We always seemed to have like four :) Has anyone tried pinging Jimbo to see if he has any
stuff hanging about?
You are over my head. I'm not sure who Jimbo is.
Pity he never implemented Intercal for the 8000. It
could have been a
real competitor for Dragon ;)
In 1986, before the big shutdown, there was an optimizing C compiler
that had been written in house. I'm sure it never made it out the door,
though. I can just imagine:
struct {
unsigned int bleb:5;
unsigned int foo:7;
unsigned int bar:11;
} thing;
...
thing.bar += thing.foo;
That probably would have taken two instructions, as the BTI architecture
allowed specifying an operand such as a bitfield of a word at a given
offset from a base register.
Not that such cases are performance critical.
6:58 p.m.
Jim Battle wrote:
Long after my tenure. Ron was one of the very first employees; I'm not
surprised he was one of the last.
Yep. The infamous zig-zag bit mode. You're right, it should have only
taken two instructions to implement that, although they would have been
*slow*.
Chris Kennedy wrote:
Which one? We
always seemed to have like four :)
Ron Crandall. When I was at BTI (1985-1986) Ron was the only main SW guy. When I talked with Ron, he said Tom Poulter (founder
of BTI, and
previously the product manager of the HP 2000, I believe) still had two
8000s and docs and media. Ron said he'd contact Tom for me, but I never
heard anything back.
Jim Lyon, who was responsible for much of the work that made the
performance of the operating system on the 8000 at least tolerable,
through such heretical concepts as using tables rather than link lists
for process control structures. He left BTI in the early 1980s for
Tandem. Googling "jimbo intercal" should pull up references to him.
Has anyone tried pinging Jimbo to see if he has
any stuff hanging about?
You are over my head. I'm not sure who Jimbo is. Pity he never implemented Intercal for the 8000.
It could have been a
real competitor for Dragon ;)
In 1986, before the big shutdown, there was an optimizing C compiler
that had been written in house. I'm sure it never made it out the door,
though. I can just imagine:
struct {
unsigned int bleb:5;
unsigned int foo:7;
unsigned int bar:11;
} thing;
...
thing.bar += thing.foo;
That probably would have taken two instructions, as the BTI architecture
allowed specifying an operand such as a bitfield of a word at a given
offset from a base register. Not that such cases are performance critical.
Curiously, it's precisely the multitude of addressing modes that made
the 8000 so staggeringly slow. For a machine with a theoretical basic
cycle type of 67ns (I say "theoretical" because it could be changed via
the SCP and most of the early hardware refused to reliably work at those
speeds) it could be quite slow. I recall that increment took more than
a microsecond (largely because it was defined as a memory locking
instruction that thus had to do a dance with the memory controller to
lock out other processors), but there were about half a dozen other ways
to increment a value in a single instruction, some of which were much
faster.
Even today I remain in awe of an ISA that dispensed with shift and
rotate operations in favor of implementing those as side-effects of
addressing modes!
The overall architecture of the machine was really quite elegant; it
just sort of suffered in the details. Since much of the team came from
the same school in Oregon and worked on the same system, the 8000
suffered a classic case of second system syndrome.
--
Chris Kennedy
chris at mainecoon.com AF6AP
http://www.mainecoon.com PGP KeyID 108DAB97
PGP fingerprint: 4E99 10B6 7253 B048 6685 6CBC 55E1 20A3 108D AB97
"Mr. McKittrick, after careful consideration..."
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