Date: Thu, 21 May 1998 01:34:55 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com> Cc: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: talk (fwd) Message-ID: <24136.895739695@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 20 May 1998 22:30:41 MDT." <3563ADF1.D265F879@softweyr.com>
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> The PC532 was an amazing development, you just don't see open hardware > like that anymore. IIRC, the PC523 grew out the 'net station' project, > were a bunch of hardware and software hackers on USENET were soliciting > attempts to make a new workstation architecture developed entired on > the net. Yeah, the way I heard it, Dave Rand and George Scolaro really really first and foremost wanted to use the machine as a UUCP feed master, which is why there are 10 serial ports on the motherboard of the PC532. :-) That machine was also responsible for teaching me Minix (where my sole contribution was a kernel task which ponged the 8 LEDs on the I/O port back and forth rather than simply run in the idle loop :) and really introducing me to the internals of forth. A friend and I ported an 8086 interpreter for fig-forth to ns32k assembly in one weekend (including all the disk and console I/O) and that's also probably the most fun I've ever had writing in assembly - the NS32K has a truly elegant instruction set that makes such programming enjoyable. I still have fond visions of getting NetBSD up on mine again and using it as a fancy console/modem/dialin server. Seems a shame to have all those nice serial ports go to waste. :) > We had the serial console, SCSI, and ethernet working and were able to > load code over the network using the AMD boot monitor, and were working > on the 4.3 BSD locore.s and task-switch when the PC532 was announced. > One of the group got a PC532 and everyone just stopped. It was mildly That's actually a pity considering that _we_ never got an ethernet solution working for ours (well, there was the SCSInet stuff, but it never really came to fruition) and that really limited its subsequent utility. :( - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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