Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!ukc!edcastle!dcl-cs!aber-cs!athene!pcg From: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: PR1ME 32I mode (was Re: Porting OSes (was DEC RISC Architecture)) Message-ID: Date: 16 Oct 90 15:20:23 GMT References: <4462@trantor.harris-atd.com> <107038@convex.convex.com> <3970@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au> Sender: pcg@aber-cs.UUCP Organization: Coleg Prifysgol Cymru Lines: 69 Nntp-Posting-Host: teachc In-reply-to: ok@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au's message of 15 Oct 90 02:10:47 GMT On 15 Oct 90 02:10:47 GMT, ok@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au (Richard A. O'Keefe) said: ok> In article , pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk ok> (Piercarlo Grandi) writes: pcg> Incidentally, I think a lot of the sophistication in hw pcg> architectures is there only because of the pride and whim of the hw pcg> designer ... e.g. the MV/8000 rings, the Pr1me I32 mode, etc... pcg> "The soul of a new machine" I think is quite revealing on this (the pcg> 'no mode bit' struggle!). ok> That's odd, the story I heard from someone wearing a PR1ME badge was ok> that 32I mode existed because a very large potential customer ok> demanded it. Maybe. But it was never supported... Or maybe it was just because the architects were ex-MIT/Honeywell/Multics people, even if the original founders were actually very much into Fortran on the original Honeywell minis (another sad story -- Digital was not first there). ok> I'm sure that PR1ME's architects were overjoyed to have a chance of ok> getting the taste of 32V out of their mouths... Oh yeah, but for a long time 32V was *the* thing. I think indeed they just did it for personal pride reasons or similar. I very much doubt that even nowadays PRIMOS (any left? :->) and its languages run in 32I mode as a matter of course. ok> Does anyone know the real story about 32I mode? Around 1982-1983 I had some contacts with Pr1me to do a port of 4.xBSD to their machines, my reasoning being that the only 32 bit mini supported by it was at the time the VAX, and just as Pr1me were competing with DEC in the commercial marketplace with some success (PRIMOS vs. VMS), the same could be expected in the technical marketplace (about 10% of total VAX sales at the time were for BSD). I would have used of course 32I mode. I was told that would not work; they said that PRIMOS did not use it, nobody used it (in practice only by special option the Fortran compiler), and so it had never been debugged, and so was not reliable, and they doubted very much one could make the machine work fully in 32I mode. They were actually very embarassed by this, because it meant that theirs were not really 32 bit systems. Naturally all this by now is history and irrelevant in the merketplace, so I feel free to comment on it now (even if I never promised that I would be discreet on the issue I have been of course). For this and other reasons (the usual ones: while their marketing was overjoyed at the idea of being able to compete with DEC, over which their hardware had a price/performance advantage, also in the UNIX market, but their technical people said "PRIMOS already has everything") the deal never got of the ground. Now Pr1me has had to eat humble pie (incidentally after Pr1me I offered the same deal to DG for the MV8000 itself, and could not save them either :->). If they had been less myopic they could have established a significant presence in the UNIX market. Note that I had chosen Pr1me as the most likely vehicle for a VAX alternative not just because little to none of their sales were in the same market segment as that served by VAXes with BSD, but also because I loved their very Multics like architecture (I had even offered that I could make a PRIMOS simulator under BSD Pr1me such that it would execute PRIMOS binaries just like TWENEX could with TOPS-10 and Multics with GCOS/TSS ones). -- Piercarlo "Peter" Grandi | ARPA: pcg%uk.ac.aber.cs@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth | UUCP: ...!mcsun!ukc!aber-cs!pcg Penglais, Aberystwyth SY23 3BZ, UK | INET: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk