Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!mailrus!ames!oliveb!pyramid!prls!philabs!sbcs!bnl!drs
From: drs@bnl.ARPA (David R. Stampf)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.transputer
Subject: Re: Is anyone out there? (Atari Abaq Info)
Message-ID: <397@bnl.ARPA>
Date: 18 Mar 88 14:09:00 GMT
References: <2176@saturn.ucsc.edu> <480@lakesys.UUCP> <1303@titan.camcon.uucp>
Reply-To: drs@bnl.UUCP (David R. Stampf)
Organization: Brookhaven National Lab., Upton, N.Y.
Lines: 62

>If you write to Perihelion they should be able to send you the
>Helios Developers Notes, this gives an overview and I posted
>most of the info last November to comp.sys.transputer, comp.sys.atari.st
>and comp.sys.amiga.
>
>Since then a group of friends has coughed up 50 pounds to become registered
>developers and we are getting manuals sent to us and offers of beta release
>hardware for porting applications.
>
>So far we have the Helios Developer's Manual which gives an overview
>of the system structure, details of the C compiler, assembler and libraries.
>Also the Helios Technical Manual which describes the message passing system,
>kernel, nucleus, servers, file formats etc.
>
>We are waiting for the Helios User's manual (shell and X-windows) and the
>hardware manual.
>
>
>The Abaq is being launched at the Hannover Fair later this month
>so more details should be out soon. The basic price will be about
>3000 pounds (without monitor) for performance below that of
>a SUN 4/110C (at 20K pounds+) for processing speed but faster for
>graphics.
>
>Atari (UK) is on (0753) 33344
>Perihelion Software is on (0749) 4203
>-- 
>  |   Adrian Cockcroft anc@camcon.uucp  ..!seismo!mcvax!ukc!camcon!anc
>-[T]- Cambridge Consultants Ltd, Science Park, Cambridge CB4 4DW,
>  |   England, UK                                        (0223) 358855
>      (You are in a maze of twisty little C004's, all alike...)


I became a registered developer in December and so far have received a Helios
Developer's Manual and a User's Manual.  The Developer's manual was useful
in describing an overview of the system, but it did point out some problems -
most notably is that there is no way to do memory management on the machine
and so it is basically a single user/single task machine.  If you add more
transputers, you can add more users, but then the individual users cannot
multiprocess (i.e. >1 CPU).  I say cannot meaning you would have to be crazy
to expose your address space to another user/process.

The people who describe helios as being Unix like are being quite kind to
themselves.  The unix compatability library has 16 (!) entry points - mostly
to do with read/write/chdir and the like.  Even MS-DOS is closer than this.
Missing of course are fork, chown, execve, ioctl, kill, profil,
ptrace, readv, select, sigsetmask, umask, wait etc.  This is not unix and
people should be aware of that.

The users manual lists 78 commands.  Sounds impressive, but...
only 23 are implemented now!  Most of those are the simple commands like
rm, mv, date - commands that have a very simple interface to the O/S.
Virtually none of the commands accept any options.  Sounds like they have
some work to do.

The good news, is that they said that this can run on an IBM-PC, on the KMAX
or on the ABAQ - so you need not run right out and buy a Mega - wait for the
prices to drop.  The bad news is that they want 500 pounds for this - and it
doesn't include any of the sexy multiprocessor support yet!  The bottom line
is - who cares.

	< dave