Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!umix!oxtrap!teemc!rphroy!tkacik
From: tkacik@rphroy.UUCP (Tom Tkacik)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.att
Subject: Re: All right! and 1.2M floppies; HwNote05
Message-ID: <3462@rphroy.UUCP>
Date: 20 Oct 88 17:59:59 GMT
References: <368@uncle.UUCP>
Reply-To: tkacik@rphroy.UUCP (Tom Tkacik)
Organization: GM Research Labs, Warren, MI
Lines: 25

In article <368@uncle.UUCP> jbm@uncle.UUCP (John B. Milton) writes:
>First thing's first. If you have ANY ideas for hardware enhancements, e-mail
>them off to me. Let me know about any special deals for hardware that give you
>the idea and all possible uses you can think of. You will get credit for your
>idea in the form of recognition, but that's all!
>-- 
>John Bly Milton IV, jbm@uncle.UUCP, n8emr!uncle!jbm@osu-cis.cis.ohio-state.edu
>home (614) 294-4823, work (614) 764-4272;  Send vi tricks, I'm making a manual

Fair enough.   I would like to put a floating point chip in my machine.  It is
just too slow without it.  It's embarassing to get beaten by XT's and
turbo-amigas, etc.

I think the hardware should be fairly easy.  Either an internal daughter board,
or an expansion board,  along with all of the disk drive circuits.
The software will be the tricky part.  First the math libraries will need to
be re-written, and made compatible with the existing ones.  Should not be
to bad, as the unixpc seems to use the IEEE floating point format.
But, then the kernal would have to be modified to save the state of the math
chip (68882, or maybe Wietek chipset), with each process swap.
Can that be done by us mear mortals who do not have the source code?

Or maybe, a process can lock the math chip, like it does with the floppy.
Only one process at a time can use it.  But what a waste.
Any further ideas, folks.