Rolm Computers: 1602, 1602A, 1602B, 1666, MSExx (was Data General Nova Star Trek)

[Erik Baigar]

Hi Chris,

sorry, but there emerged more questions from my side  ;-)

On Fri, 29 Apr 2016, Christian Kennedy wrote:

> Hawk, but not the odd S/140 and MV/8000 punches) and software (ARTS,
> ARTS/32) were ROLM designs.

I only know ARTS from ads being sold on eBay - this is some
form od Ada development environment (or a complete OS?)? The
acronym probably means something like "Ada Real Time System" (?).

Was this a cross compiler tool or did it run natively on the
hardware? As there is a /32 variant, do you think a variant
for the 16 bit machines like 16xx or MSE14 did survive some-
where?

> Steve Wallach had incorporated into the PTE format for the Eagle in
> order to turn memory references into I/O requests that would be
> transparently resolved in the physical memory of another machine.

Although I do not recognize the "PTE format", I guess the Eagle
project is related to a widely sold US made aircraft, right? This
one carried at least one Hawk/32  ;-)

Some of the Rolm stuff I have got is from the company which serviced
the equipment of the ATTAS aircraft...

   http://www.dlr.de/dlr/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-10644#gallery/1751
   http://www.dlr.de/dlr/Portaldata/1/Resources/documents/ATTAS_Handout_2001.pdf

...and this also had Hawk/32 on board with the whole lot of Rolms
interconnected by a fiber based MCA bus to exchange data. So this
seemt having been common hardware those days ;-)

> deal from each other ("Yes, I know that the PATU instruction only occurs
> twice in the body of AOS/VS, but it's executed on every context switch
> and as such it's probably not a really good idea to implement it by
> having the microcode scrub each entry in the TLB").

I guess you have not been happy with context switching and how
the Rolm microcode implemented it. Unfortunately, there is nothing
on the internet related to the instruction set of the Hawk/32
family but the hardware contained lot of big custom chips and
therefor I guess it was far more powerful and complex than
e.g. the Eclipse or earlier machines.

    Best regards,

       Erik.