1 May
2005
1 May
'05
5:42 p.m.
Please no flames.... but back in my younger days when
I used to (hack?) the Telenet X25 PADs, it seemed like
every other machine I ran into was a Prime with its
familiar "Primos" banner. I also had a grad student
that worked for me that HATED the one he used in
school so much that he bought it years later at the
Universities surplus auction, held a party and handed
out sledge hammers to everyone. You can guess the
rest.
Of all the years purusing the salvage yards, I have
never seem one. Interesting.
Brian.
--- Jay West <jwest at classiccmp.org> wrote:
It was written....
To say that they must have been quite common
machines at one point,
there are very few left unfortunately - I'm
surprised there aren't more
survivors.
They were definitely common
machines at one point...
I worked on hundreds of
them literally.
Actually, I don't know of anyone else on this
list
who has any kind of
PR1ME, but doubtless someone does...
I
know of a couple listmembers who have one or
two...
I don't, and would very much like one :)
Jay West
1 May
1 May
10:29 p.m.
Brian Roth wrote:
Please no flames.... but back in my younger days when
I used to
(hack?) the Telenet X25 PADs, it seemed like every other machine I
ran into was a Prime with its familiar "Primos" banner. I also had a
grad student that worked for me that HATED the one he used in school
so much that he bought it years later at the Universities surplus
auction, held a party and handed out sledge hammers to everyone. You
can guess the rest.
There was one at Harvey Mudd College -- it was hated by the programmers
there as well. If I remember correctly, it was 8086-like in that it was
a 16 bit architecture extended to address more memory, probably via
segments. I do remember that arrays were limited to 64K.
- J
2 May
2 May
8:04 a.m.
There was one at Harvey Mudd College -- it was hated
by the programmers
there as well. If I remember correctly, it was 8086-like in that it
was a 16 bit architecture extended to address more memory, probably
via segments. I do remember that arrays were limited to 64K.
Yes, 50-series machines had segmented architecture. Most code since
1980 or earlier ran in 64k segments. IIRC, 64R-mode code was limited
to one segment; 64V-mode code could span many. Older addressing modes
were limited to 16- or 32-k. In theory, the compilers would allow
data structures to cross segment boundaries, but in practice, they
often had bugs that prevented such behavior from working correctly.
I was bitten several times by large array issues.
Since it was all virtual, the usual mapping had user code in segments
4000-4???; stack was in segments 6000 and up. The OS lived in (some
of) the first thousand (octal) segments. Seems like the shared code
segment bits of various products (compilers, MIDASPLUS, etc.) lived
in the 2000 range.
De
7174
days inactive
7174
days old
2 comments
3 participants
participants (3)
-
abacos_98＠yahoo.com -
drb＠msu.edu -
napier＠waste.org