From coff at tuhs.org Fri Sep 5 01:00:31 2025 From: coff at tuhs.org (Stuff Received via COFF) Date: Thu, 4 Sep 2025 11:00:31 -0400 Subject: [COFF] The gallant font? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <9beffcbc-e500-bcc8-852e-b0d97ce74e12@riddermarkfarm.ca> A question was asked on comp.sys.sun.hardware (reproduced below as I could not find a link for it). The OBP description (https://github.com/openbios/openboot/blob/master/obp/pkg/termemu/gallant.fth) says nothing about author -- not surprising as all copyright is invested in one's employer. Anyone here know? S. On 2025-08-27 15:33, Jens Schweikhardt wrote on comp.sys.sun.hardware: > hello, world\n > > I'm digging into the history of the gallant 12x22 font that was used > as the console font for many SUN products. Think "ok" prompt. I know > it from watching SPARCstations boot. > While it at some point made its way into BSD, as evidenced by NetBSD's > https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-current/src/sys/dev/wsfont/gallant12x22.h, > I asked Jef and he guesses it was designed by someone at Sun. > Any old Sun engineers around who can contribute a little bit of > history of the gallant font and associated files? > > Regards, > > Jens From coff at tuhs.org Sat Sep 6 01:04:14 2025 From: coff at tuhs.org (Clem Cole via COFF) Date: Fri, 5 Sep 2025 11:04:14 -0400 Subject: [COFF] [ih] Confusion in the RFCs In-Reply-To: <4A3E1B0C-0AEB-458D-BFFC-7428DDCCC983@comcast.net> References: <30997E86-9BC4-496E-86CE-AC6AFAF3DC8F@comcast.net> <240F434C-AFF1-44F3-A072-66DC658B1B0F@comcast.net> <30A88A33-049B-456E-A51F-69EDD0D301D9@comcast.net> <4A3E1B0C-0AEB-458D-BFFC-7428DDCCC983@comcast.net> Message-ID: below.. [note this really belongs in COFF, as it's less Internet History and more reminiscent of us old guys] On Fri, Sep 5, 2025 at 8:44 AM John Day via Internet-history < internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote: > It inspired everything we did. It was a revelation. That is why our PDP-11 > OS language was called PDP-11 Espol, their OS language. > Fascinating - did that survive? Could you tell us more? I did not know that someone had tried to make an ESPOL for the 11. Was it a cross compiler, and what was the native OS? I grew up on BLISS and C, of course, and knew about other system languages like BCPL and concurrent Pascal that targeted the 11, but I never knew about an implementation of ESPOL for it. > > I knew there was one around UCLA somewhere and at Stanford. Knuth wrote > the early Algol compiler for it. It was the first system to use a stack for > procedures, as well as arithmetic. Tagged architecture, descriptor based > memory. The system had a coherence I have never seen again. > No doubt, the B5000 was the first "high-level" system design, incorporating everything you describe, along with some interesting support for its multi-tasking concepts. [I remember trying to wrap my head around the idea of how a cactus stack worked]. One of my old colleagues at Tektronix was Bill Price, who was earlier one of the MCP's designers and implementors, and he took great pride in schooling us youngsters in those days. He pointed out to us that if Burroughs' management had had any real idea of what they were doing and how far out it was and different from anything else being done at IBM in White Plains or Remington Rand/Eckert-Mauchly in North Philly, he is pretty sure they would have shut it down. As Bill explained it to us (then UNIX guys in the late 1970s), the designers of the MCP were very rigorous in their design, but had a great sense of humor and used really marvelous names for some of the data structures and kernel tasks. The MCP was extremely well structured, but when they ended up with something that did not quite fit in their structured design, they gave the special case to Bill to deal with in his "Old Weird Harold" kernel task, which, among other things, maintained "the bed," which was a list of tasks awaiting actions. One of my favorite actions was when Bill shared the comments from some of the code he still had, which revealed that Old Weird Harold was responsible for "monitoring the bed for something to fork." Also, one minor correction, while I do believe that Burroughs had an LA-based team, I am under the impression that most of the work on both HS and SW for the B5000 and B6000 families was done in Philadelphia (well, Paoli to be more precise). > > Trivial example: 48-bit word. Floating point format was a 39-bit mantissa > (sign bit, 8-bit exponent) but the decimal point was at the right end of > the word. Integers were merely unnormalized floating point numbers. No > integer to real conversion. It just worked. Also, it was pointed out to me > recently that there was a hardware operator that convert an integer to BCD. > A 39-bit binary integer would convert within 48 bits. (The Burros 3500 was > a COBOL machine and all decimal including the addressing!) Burros was > architecture-agnostic. One could go on and on. > Yeah, they got it about language-driven architectures. My favorite Burroughs machine was their mid-range B1700, which they targeted at small businesses. This machine changed its microcode on the fly depending on the application (*i.e.,* it had Cobol microcode, Algol microcode, etc.). We studied this system in great detail in Dan Siewiorek's computer architecture class when I was an undergrad. It was a very cool machine that really learned a great deal about how microcoding could be used (and some of you have heard my story during my UCB grad qualifiers when I was asked a question about microcoding and used the B1700 to answer it). > > Why can’t we build systems like that any more. > Sadly, because often simpler is much less costly, and as I have said many times,* "Simple Economics always beats Sophisticated Architecture."* -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From coff at tuhs.org Sat Sep 6 16:02:01 2025 From: coff at tuhs.org (segaloco via COFF) Date: Sat, 06 Sep 2025 06:02:01 +0000 Subject: [COFF] Early Bell Laboratories CPU Datasheets Message-ID: Just wanted to share a couple of datasheets that may interest folks here. This evening I scanned both the MAC-8 and MAC-4 preliminary datasheets from late 1978. While many details of the MAC-8 are currently known, the MAC-4 has been elusive in my study until I received these documents in a collection of MAC-8 materials. [https://archive.org/details/212-b-mac-8-data-sheet](https://archive.org/details/212-b-mac-8-data-sheet/) [https://archive.org/details/mac-4-specification-sheet](https://archive.org/details/mac-4-specification-sheet/) These are Bell Laboratories' 1970's 8-bit and 4-bit microprocessors which preceded their work on the WE32000. I have some hints on the typical development environment too. The BTL editions of the UNIX 5.0 and SVR2 manuals contain numerous references to MAC-8 and MAC-4 tools. I intend to preserve those pages too as part of a larger effort to illuminate the history of these two processors. I've provided much more info here: https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/western-electric-component-databooks.1250931/#post-1464263 - Matt G. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: