Rumor has it that Dan Williams may have mentioned these words: Well, in computer connectivity, xmit == transmit, so x == trans, right? So xmas for us should be transmas! ;^> Hear, Hear! For our Canadian friends out there, "Merry Crystal, and a Happy Clear Beer!" Who remembers that one? ;-P Happy Hollydaze! Roger "Merch" Merchberger -- Roger "Merch" Merchberger | "Bugs of a feather flock together." sysadmin, Iceberg Computers | Russell Nelson zmerch(a)30below.com |

Yep, all of that :) -- adrian/witchy Binary Dinosaurs creator/curator www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk - the UKs biggest home computer collection?

Tom Jennings wrote: ... Post 1964? Why, yes, although I can only just now talk about it since it is past the 10 year cctalk rule. I was an early employee of Chromatic Research, a failed 1993-1999 start up that I believe coined the term "media processor." The MPACT1 and MPACT2 chips contained a LIW processor that had 9b bytes, and all math was 2's complement. The datapath was 72b wide, and most operations could work on eight 9b bytes, four 18b words, or two "36b words" (although the multipliers copped out an only did a 27bx27b multiply). Why the 9-bittedness? There were two reasons. First, Chromatic wrongly foresaw MPEG as being the big draw, and computing ((color component 1) - (color component 2)) required a 9b delta; 16b could have been used, but only four pixels could have been processed per clock. We doubled the peak throughput by adding only 12.5% more datapath resources. The second reason was that the chip used RAMBUS memories, which were only sold with 9b channels, and we had no particular need for parity. Other MPACT oddities: Each 72b instruction bundle had a two bit field that indicated that the pair of instructions had to be either executed sequentially, executed in parallel, executed in parallel "VECLEN1" or "VECLEN2" times in a row (where VECLEN1 and VECLEN2 were registers containing a repeat count). The chip had 512 72b registers, and the programming game was to work on vectors of data in this register while streaming data to/from the RDRAM memory (Chromatic was one of early adopters of RAMBUS memory). The multipliers had various rounding modes, including "round random", where 6b pseudorandom bias was added just below the trucation point, as some audio filter algorithms have better spectral properties with this type of rounding. There weren't separate shift left/shift right instructions, just a shift. Positive shift counts shifted left, negative shifted right. This was especially important since for SIMD data, sometimes different fields had to shift opposite directions in the same instruction. The chip implemented CGA/EGA/VGA in all of their textmode, planar mode, packed mode glory via emulation. All VGA register accesses actually got funnelled into a VGA command FIFO. When the FIFO went non-empty, an interrupt was taken to the VGA emulation routine; it would parse the VGA commands and carry out the necessary work on the flat, packed pixel framebuffer so that the results looked as they should. It seems laughable now when multiple VGA cores would fit on a pinhead, but back then in 0.65 um, a VGA core would have been a significant cost. I guess I'll stop there, although there were a number of other interesting features.

Hello list, Recently acquired a KRQ50 for my VAX so now I'm looking for the media to go with it. According to the literature, the KRQ50 will work with RRD50 and the RRD40-HB/HD. RRD50 seems to be pretty rare, however there are a couple of RRD40 at eBay right now. The question is that would a RRD40-DA (tabletop version) work with the KRQ50? The RRD40-DA has a standard 50-pin SCSI-I centronics connector, but I don't think the KRQ50 do SCSI, right? Or it doesn't matter? Furthermore, what is the difference between RRD40-HB/HD (KRQ50 version) and RRD40-AA/DA (SCSI version)? /wai-sun

On Thu, 30 Dec 2004 17:31:55 +0800, Wai-Sun Chia <waisun.chia(a)hp.com> wrote: The KRQ50 version of the rrd40 is not scsi it is serial driven (lms ?). The rrd40 are also really slow less then 1x speed drives. Unless you want it for shits and giggles I wouldn't recommend using one. It would be quicker to use a pc running simh to copy files across when you need them (not as fun though). Also if you do find the right rrd40 it probably won't come with caddies or cables. Dan Dan

On Sat, 25 Dec 2004, Stan Barr wrote: Really!?!? I suppose it ought to count! :-)

I assume that you don't want to include PARITY bits, ECC, or other "appendages" to the actual data bits ?

Tom> On Sat, 25 Dec 2004, Witchy wrote: Tom> How many computers (automatic, electronic, digital, Tom> stored-program, etc) used an odd number of bits? Philips EL-X8, home of the famous THE operating system -- 27 bits. Tom> Were any of them not signed-magnitude? Eg. odd number of bits Tom> 2's complement? I'm not sure. Might have a reference somewhere. Also, wasn't the Goodyear STARAN supercomputer a one bit computer? paul

In message <m1Chyl9-000JDlC@p850ug1> ard(a)p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) wrote: How about 1 bit (Motorola MC14500)? :) Later. -- Phil. | Acorn Risc PC600 Mk3, SA202, 64MB, 6GB, philpem(a)philpem.me.uk | ViewFinder, 10BaseT Ethernet, 2-slice, http://www.philpem.me.uk/ | 48xCD, ARCINv6c IDE, SCSI ... A seminar on Time Travel will be held two weeks ago