Whitechapel Computer Works MG-1

[Jon Elson]

On 11/30/2014 05:29 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
>
>
> Make no mistake, this was a remarkable design for the 
> time, architecturally speaking.  According to WikiP, the 
> original intention was to clone the VAX, but the legal 
> challenge to DEC was abandoned.
>
> I think that some avoided NSC when it came to 
> MPUs--support wasn't what it should have been, nor the 
> marketing attention span.  NSC was fine as a second-source 
> for many things, but there was a certain reluctance, I 
> think, in the industry to use them as the prime source.
>
Absolutely!  We got a complete package, with a bunch of 
Multibus boards, cross
compilers that ran on the VAX, source of the debugger that 
was in ROMS on
the boards, schematics, etc.  All I needed to hack them into 
a multiprocessor
system.

This was all before the KA630 uVAX came out!  Our benchmarks 
of the NS
system running from RAM on the local board came out to be 
about 1/3
performance of the 780, which was quite phenomenal for a 
single-board
processor at the time.  This was with the MMU removed from 
the board.

I cloned a 16032 system that ran Genix, and it was as slow 
as a dog!
I don't know why.  Partly, it had the MMU turned on, and was 
using
Multibus memory that may have been pretty slow.  Also, the 
compilers
may have had much worse optimization than NS' own that did 
pretty
well on our multiprocessor.

Jon