4 Sep
2014
4 Sep
'14
12:03 p.m.
On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 2:45 PM, Glen Slick <glen.slick at gmail.com> wrote:
... QED993 CPU boards...
http://www.ebay.com/itm/200600166676
I bought one of those and was disappointed to discover that they do
not implement any floating point emulation at all and I had no luck
getting either 2.11BSD or RSTS/E 10.1 to run on it.
So what's the QED993 good for? RSX-11 or a really fast RT-11 box? TSX-11?
Who were they aiming at?
-ethan
4 Sep
4 Sep
12:18 p.m.
On Sep 4, 2014, at 1:03 PM, Ethan Dicks
<ethan.dicks at gmail.com> wrote:
There was supposed to be a "daughter board" for the FPU, but I don't think
any actually exist. I have never figured out why they left this off the processor board.
As far as a market, I once heard a rumour they were produced as replacements for the
nuclear industry.
On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 2:45 PM, Glen Slick
<glen.slick at gmail.com> wrote:
... QED993 CPU boards...
http://www.ebay.com/itm/200600166676
I bought one of those and was disappointed to discover that they do
not implement any floating point emulation at all and I had no luck
getting either 2.11BSD or RSTS/E 10.1 to run on it.
So what's the QED993 good for? RSX-11 or a really fast RT-11 box? TSX-11?
Who were they aiming at?
-ethan
1:01 p.m.
On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 12:18 PM, Roe Peterson <roeapeterson at gmail.com>
wrote:
TSX-11?
I have had on the back-burner for a long time a plan to rebuild 2.11bsd
using the floating point simulator so that I could run it on my QED, but
I've been way too sidetracked to take it on. The use of floating point is
pervasive throughout (even the 2nd stage bootloader uses FP instructions)
so a great deal would need to be rebuilt and/or fixed. And the FP
simulator is apparently untested in 2.11 so there's that...
- Josh
On Sep 4, 2014, at 1:03 PM, Ethan Dicks
<ethan.dicks at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 2:45 PM, Glen Slick <glen.slick at gmail.com>
wrote:
...
QED993 CPU boards...
http://www.ebay.com/itm/200600166676
I bought one of those and was disappointed to discover that they do
not implement any floating point emulation at all and I had no luck
getting either 2.11BSD or RSTS/E 10.1 to run on it.
So what's the QED993 good for? RSX-11 or a really fast RT-11 box?
Who were they aiming at?
There was supposed to be a "daughter board" for the FPU, but I don't think
any actually exist. I have never figured out why they left this off the
processor board.
As far as a market, I once heard a rumour they were produced as
replacements for the nuclear industry.
-ethan
12:26 p.m.
My understanding: Really fast integer performance targeted at the
finanical "services" industry.
On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 3:03 PM, Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 2:45 PM, Glen Slick
<glen.slick at gmail.com> wrote:
... QED993 CPU boards...
http://www.ebay.com/itm/200600166676
I bought one of those and was disappointed to discover that they do
not implement any floating point emulation at all and I had no luck
getting either 2.11BSD or RSTS/E 10.1 to run on it.
So what's the QED993 good for? RSX-11 or a really fast RT-11 box? TSX-11?
Who were they aiming at?
-ethan
1:35 p.m.
Very interesting stuff. HFT on PDP-11? LOL. I had always assumed that most
of the post-DEC PDP-11 compatible CPUs were used almost exclusively in
process control. It's neat to hear that there were other fields, where the
PDP-11 remained in use long after it was discontinued by DEC.
Best,
Sean
On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 3:26 PM, Paul Birkel <pbirkel at gmail.com> wrote:
My understanding: Really fast integer performance
targeted at the
finanical "services" industry.
On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 3:03 PM, Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 2:45 PM, Glen Slick
<glen.slick at gmail.com> wrote:
TSX-11?
... QED993 CPU boards...
http://www.ebay.com/itm/200600166676
I bought one of those and was disappointed to discover that they do
not implement any floating point emulation at all and I had no luck
getting either 2.11BSD or RSTS/E 10.1 to run on it.
So what's the QED993 good for? RSX-11 or a really fast RT-11 box?
Who were they aiming at?
-ethan
12:32 p.m.
On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 12:03 PM, Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 2:45 PM, Glen Slick
<glen.slick at gmail.com> wrote:
The information I got from the seller here is that these were pulled
... QED993 CPU boards...
http://www.ebay.com/itm/200600166676
I bought one of those and was disappointed to discover that they do
not implement any floating point emulation at all and I had no luck
getting either 2.11BSD or RSTS/E 10.1 to run on it.
So what's the QED993 good for? RSX-11 or a really fast RT-11 box? TSX-11?
Who were they aiming at? from from something like a stock trader firm where
speed was
everything.
These RAM drive cards were probably part of the same system setup:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/200594707301
Those look like 128MB cards in a 39x8 array of MB814100 4Mbit DRAMs, I
assume in an ECC configuration.
No idea what software they ran on these systems.
Not a lot of info on the archive of the Quickware Engineering & Design site.
https://web.archive.org/web/20000303194911/http://www.quickware.com/
1:13 p.m.
On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 3:32 PM, Glen Slick <glen.slick at gmail.com> wrote:
I've known folks in that biz, and 20 years ago, it was all Sun SPARC
(the guys I knew anyway).
So what's
the QED993 good for? RSX-11 or a really fast RT-11 box? TSX-11?
Who were they aiming at?
The information I got from the seller here is that these were pulled
from from something like a stock trader firm where speed was
everything. These RAM drive cards were probably part of the same
system setup:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/200594707301
Those look like 128MB cards in a 39x8 array of MB814100 4Mbit DRAMs, I
assume in an ECC configuration.
Huh... If that's an MSCP drive, it's kinda handy. It might take a few
minutes to populate via serial at power-on, but pretty nice once it's
loaded.
-ethan
4:04 p.m.
On 09/04/2014 01:13 PM, Ethan Dicks wrote:
On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 3:32 PM, Glen Slick
<glen.slick at gmail.com> wrote:
I built the workstations and servers for a small "program trading" group
that was being formed within a big investment bank in 1992. Yes it was
all being built on SPARC systems, but if anybody in that line of work
could make a case for using any tool or product to make a buck faster,
they'd have gone for it.
My best guess - given what the seller's indicated - would be that the
QED's were used in an existing ticker plant or market data system,
handling leased line serial comms on one side, using the RAM disk to
buffer data or speed up queries, and just horked the data around without
acting on it. If it's just packets or blocks of data being fed to other
systems, the lack of floating point wouldn't matter so much.
--S.
The information I got from the seller here is that these were pulled
from from something like a stock trader firm where speed was
everything.
I've known folks in that biz, and 20 years ago, it was all Sun
SPARC
(the guys I knew anyway). 
5:13 p.m.
On 9/4/14 4:04 PM, Steven M Jones wrote:
My best guess - given what the seller's indicated
- would be that the
QED's were used in an existing ticker plant or market data system,
handling leased line serial comms on one side, using the RAM disk to
buffer data or speed up queries, and just horked the data around without
acting on it. If it's just packets or blocks of data being fed to other
systems, the lack of floating point wouldn't matter so much.
John Wilson knows the details, since they were also one of his customers
according to Dave Carroll.
Apparently several companies, including Mentec, were supplying boards to
keep these systems getting faster, and the sources would change depending
on which vendor had a faster board for the application. Apparently, E11
eventually won.
11:31 p.m.
On Thu, Sep 04, 2014 at 05:13:08PM -0700, Al Kossow wrote:
I forget in what ways I'm sworn to secrecy so I'll keep it vague, but if
it's the customer it sounds like, they were running all proprietary code
on 11M+ and using DECnet for the transport. Trades were load-balanced
across hundreds of PDP-11s (by splitting up the alphabet I think?). It
was frickin' AWESOME, and a religious experience to visit. All eventually
moved to Linux (which was an easy step once the emulation was on Linux,
and it ran as a hybrid for a while with some pieces inside the PDP-11
and some outside using the NP: named pipe interface which I'll document
some day).
My best guess -
given what the seller's indicated - would be that the
QED's were used in an existing ticker plant or market data system,
handling leased line serial comms on one side, using the RAM disk to
buffer data or speed up queries, and just horked the data around without
acting on it. If it's just packets or blocks of data being fed to other
systems, the lack of floating point wouldn't matter so much.
John Wilson knows the details, since they were also one of his customers
according to Dave Carroll. Apparently several companies, including Mentec, were
supplying boards to
keep these systems getting faster, and the sources would change depending
on which vendor had a faster board for the application.
Those guys were wonderfully pragmatic. They used whatever was fastest but
always kept re-evaluating whatever else was out there (so yes they used
QED and Mentec and I think also Strobe hardware, before E11). They didn't
believe marketing claims from *anyone* and tested everything heavily on
their own workload before deploying it. I got some of the most fantastically
specific bug reports from them ... the kind where you fix the bug in five
minutes because they tell you precisely how the behavior is wrong.
John Wilson
D Bit
3542
days inactive
3543
days old
9 comments
9 participants
participants (9)
-
aek＠bitsavers.org -
classiccmp＠crash.com -
derschjo＠gmail.com -
ethan.dicks＠gmail.com -
glen.slick＠gmail.com -
pbirkel＠gmail.com -
roeapeterson＠gmail.com -
scaron＠umich.edu -
wilson＠dbit.com