Notes on HP3000 WCS Microcode, Series 37 on ebay in Germany

[Lee Courtney]

"Was Lee Courtney involved with the APL 3000 project?" - unfortunately no I
was not. Just RTE on the 1000 and later MPE on PA-RISC. All I know is that
there was microcode support required to run APL on Series II/III
micro-architecture machines. That microcode was not moved to later
micro-architectures (Series 3x, 4x, 6x, 7x) so there was no APL available.
I don't think HP had enough customers using APL to justify the effort. Too
bad because was an innovative APL.

Stan Sieler et al are trying to get APL\3000 up and running on an emulated
3000 via SIMH. He's CC'd here and can comment.

Al - it would be a Very Good Thing to get those APL ROMS dumped when
possible.

Lee Courtney

On Wed, Sep 16, 2020 at 6:04 AM Al Kossow via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
wrote:

> On 9/16/20 5:30 AM, Rodney Brown via cctalk wrote:
>
> > It's possible that one of the SYSWCS64 files may match the assembly
> listing on bitsavers, but that listing could allow guessing the
> > architecture, assuming horizontal microcode and matching against the HP
> 3000 stack machine instruction set it implements.
> >
>
> I suspect the listing is for this machine
> https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102691253
>
> I remember looking at the microcode boards in it at one point, and it had
> APL roms
> Attempting to dump them isn't possible right now.
>
> Was Lee Courtney involved with the APL 3000 project?
>
>
>

-- 
Lee Courtney
+1-650-704-3934 cell