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PERQ Workstations by R. D. Davis

1. jump conditions memory access e Single instructions combine arithmetic or logical operations with con ditional jumps e Microinstructions control CPU access to the memory allowing the Storage of 1 2 or 4 16 bit words Fetching of 1 2 or 4 16 bit words e The words may be accesses in forward or reverse order MADR MDI MDO 51 5 PERQI VS PERQIA PROGRAMMING 239 51 5 PERQ1 vs PERQIA programming The assembler reflects features of the hardware specific to the PERQI or PERQIA CPU by restricting usage of the following features e The percent sign which signals the use of the base register may only be used on the PERQIA e MQ RBase Victim LeapPop Goto Shift MultiplyStep and Di videStep may only be used on the PERQIA e LatchMA may only be used on the PERQI 51 6 Mint Chris Lamb s stepfather is close personal friends with Peter Hibbard the author of Mint Peter Hibbard from CMU now works at Adobe Software Mint is extremely Scribe like CL 51 7 TeX A TeX dvi previewer is available Chris sent Bill a copy what OS is this for I haven t received a copy of this yet Robert Marshall has a version of initex and virtex 3 141 for PNX together with the tex and latex format files As of Feb 26 1993 he was in the midst of porting xdvi They run tolerably fast on a perq 1a He would like to know if someone has a dvi previewer for PNX 51 8 PERQ POS Software Written Bein
2. MBOOT BOOT POS FILE SYSTEM 211 file containing the microcode interpreter A file containing the operating system 42 3 POS File system hierarchical multi directory file system supports search lists and non contigous files random access devices are divided into a number of sections called partitions Each partition can contain any number of directories and each directory may contain other directories or files Directories are stored as standard files and can be accessed by any program to maximize disk utilization neither files nor blocks within files need to be on contiguous disk sectors PERQs file system stresses reliability All critical retrieval information is redundantly stored and verification checks on disk operations insure the integrity of files a special Scavenger program can reconstruct damaged disk structures if necessary The boot area may possibly contain a table of offsets for those files referenced by boot letter so if there s garbage or zeros or the address of a file that doesn t contain valid boot code the DDS hangs in the 150 160 range during booting Then for binding accent boot files BindBoot determines the addresses of the specified files and writes them into that table CL 42 4 POS Display Window Manager used to manipulate screen information partitions the screen into separate areas of windows windows may be moved around the screen enlarged or contracted in two dimensions
3. When I asked about any influences of Modula 2 on PERQ Pascal since Niklaus Wirth was at Xerox PARC Brian Rosen replied Wirth was at PARC around when I was there but I did not have much contact with him We were aware of Modula 2 when it came out but I don t think you can say that Perq Pascal was heavily influenced by Modula 2 There are MESA like characteristics in Perq Pascal John Strait was the original compiler guru most of the language constructs are his work He was a Pascal purist and was always trying to keep extensions and changes to a minimum BR mailing list Jan 5 1993 51 4 Microcode Microprogramming Microinstructions 51 4 MICROCODE MICROPROGRAMMING 237 Each microinstruction is a collection of 12 fields with a total of 48 bits Each microinstruction is executed by the machine in 170 nS or 1 micro cycle An instruction is a sequence of phrases Microinstructions are produced from one or more instruction by the microassembler Format of a microinstruction 4 X Y A IBIWIHIALU IF SF Z CND JMP 4 4 F Function field controls interpretation of SF Z field contents The ALU field of a microinstruction encodes the function used by the ALU to combine the A and B inputs to the ALU in the following ways there are only 16 functions listed here shouldn t t
4. Implementation of the RIG OS precedessor of Accent began on an early version of the Data General Eclipse computer at the University of Rochester 2 8 1976 Fall of 1976 First usable implementation of RIG came on line a network of DG Eclipse systems and Xerox Alto s was used 2 9 Late 1970 s Carnegie Mellon put out a proposal for SPICE Scientific Personal Interac tive Computing Environment environment They wanted a system which would be similar to a Xerox Star or Apollo only less expensive The original PERQ was developed as a response to this proposal he SPICE project was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency DOD ARPA Order No 3597 monitored by the Air Force Avionics Laboratory Under Contract F33615 78 C 1551 1978 2 10 1978 In 1978 Brian Rosen and Stan Kriz decided to produce a commercial ver sion of the Alto since Xerox had decided not to produce the workstation Three Rivers Computer took the concepts of the Alto and using all new design designed the PERQ graphics workstation The PERQ was the first commercial product to use a bitmapped display Brian Rosen was responsible for most of the Perq s design NF 2 11 1979 19 2 11 1979 May 1979 The PERQ product was announced Brian Rosen headed the PERQ development June 1979 The SERC s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory was the first customer to place an order for a PERQ August 1979 The PERQ prototype was demonstrated a
5. None of the Perqs can be booted without having a hard disk attached they cannot even be booted from a boot floppy PERQs did not exist as diskless workstations unless of course there were no plans to use the PERQ at all until a hard disk was installed Adding New Partitions The NewPart utility is used to add new partions to a disk Formatting a Hard Disk The POS operating system is always used to format a hard disk no matter what OS will be used on a PERQ The following steps are used to format a hard disk 1 Boot the system from a floppy if present hard disk is not bootable 2 Dismount the boot floppy gt dis f 3 Insert load floppy into drive and mount it 195 gt mo f 4 Run the badsector program to check the hard disk s bad blocks If a bad sector map is not found you will need to tell badsector which Sectors are bad manually Use the help command from badsector to see what other commands are available You will need to have the factory disk defect list to perform the following You may be able to work around this by selecting additional commands to scan the disk for bad blocks gt badsector CMD gt readmap The above command will read the bad sector map into a buffer CMD gt 11 The bad sectors will be listed Compare these if any with those in the disk s manufacturer supplied defect list If they match exactly then you can quit this program Go to the last step below the
6. According to ADF the Perq 3B was originally designed to run under the Accent OS however some perhaps later internal Perq company docu ments show that a SunOS type of Unix OS was to be implemented 2 18 1986 Spring of 1986 The demise of the RIG OS occured due to the obsolescence of its base of Data General Eclipse and Xerox Alto hardware Interesting that this should happen around the same time as the demise of PERQ Systems this was back in 1991 26 CHAPTER 2 HISTORY May of 1986 The successor to Accent the Mach OS now runs suc cessfully on a wide variety of machines including many VAX systems IBM RT PC SUN 3 and Encore MultiMax Also interesting that Mach begins to really take off as the Pergs fade into oblivion there is no mention of any effort to get Mach to run on the PERQs A company Intran which produced software for the design of forms and graphics that ran on the Perq ported the software over to a Sun platform The software was ported from Perq Pascal to C In order to do that they loaded PNX onto a Perq and then used a PERQ utility to convert the software JG Intran is now a subsidiary of Xerox This is only being mentioned here because the SERC document mentions something about being able to convert the POS SEG files by some process by which they will be made runnable under Unix however it appears that this was done under a Unix system QNIX which ran on top of Accent Note also that CL fou
7. Spider Systems possibly performed some early implementation of net working for the Perqs BF T recall Nick Felisiak of Spider now there s part of the Perq legacy all those spin off companies formed by the redundant Perq brains telling me that someone was writing a book about the Perq Did anything come of that Charles Curran July 30 1993 PERQ Fanatics mailing list 3RCC eventually became part of Accent Systems along with Uni logic Unilogic called itself Scribe Systems for a while and S A Y bought 30 CHAPTER 2 HISTORY it all out While I worked for Accent Scribe the Accent folks bought the assets of a company from Taxachusetts called Canaan Now there was a box to hate it was an IBM 370 compatible box the size of a PERQ that ran VM CMS Anthony A Datri July 30 1993 PERQ Fanatics mailing list On a seperate note from the timeline since ICL was bought out by a Japanese company a year or so ago could this have anything to do with the group Rikei who took the majority of the PERQ stuff from Accent Systems to Japan Chapter 3 Accent Systems Corp Originally formed as a computer marketing and service organization Expanded its marketing strategy to encompass software and hardware integration by forming its Application Products Division which focused on computer integrated manufacturing requirements within the aerospace au tomotive and federal defense markets Sold the MaxPro envi
8. This bandwidth is enough to support both screens the color and B amp W monitors simultaneously 1024 x 1280 pixels x 8 bits pixel color mapped Color cabinet houses four boards Color system interface board Two identical 1 MByte memory cards Color video card Each of the 1 MByte memory cards contain 1 MByte memory 136 64K RAMs Address drivers 12 chips Octal registers 42 chips 19 6 KRIZ TYPE MONITORS 107 Control and random logic 30 chips Testing circuitry 15 chips A total of 235 chips Color map 256 x 32 10 red 10 green 10 blue 10 extra bright e programmable 64 x 64 x 2 cursor B amp W and Color supported simultaneously each with its own cursor Physical packaging was to be Beautiful in every way 19 6 Kriz Type Monitors Were these the ones used with the PERQ1 s The Kriz type monitors required 24V from the power supply unit as opposed to the 55V required by other monitors 19 7 Random Memory Displays Recall that the display is driven from main memory when the OS boots up a segment of main store is allocated and locked down and the display hardware is given a pointer to the start of that block When the system crashes usually that information is corrupted so what gets put on the screen is just tandom sections of main memory which may include the area that had the display image I d say the PERQ crashes in a more spectacular fashion than any other comput
9. q quit command CMD gt insert This will allow you to insert bad blocks into the bad sector map from the defect list You will be prompted for the disk type that you are using In the following example a Toshiba MK56 drive was used If the type of drive that you will be using is not contained in your disk params file you will need to press RETURN and enter all of the disk parameters manually Enter disk model or press RETURN to enter other parameters mk56 Enter bad spots by byte or sector B or S b You will normally enter b to enter bad spots by byte 4 digits as listed on most manufacturer s defect lists You will be prompted further not shown here for the bad sectors After you are finished entering the bad sectors continue with the following CMD gt 11 List the bad sectors in the buffer to make sure that you have entered them correctly 196 CHAPTER 39 PERQ KEEPER S GUIDE CMD gt writefile Writes the bad sectors from buffer to the bad sector map CMD gt printfile File badsectorfile This writes a file named badsectorfile that you can read or print out later CMD gt q This will exit the badsector program 4 Run the DiskTest program Note that running format with checking on is slow running format with checking off and then using scan acheives the same results only faster The help command may be used to obtain a listing of commands gt disktest Run the disktest program COMMAN
10. Depending on the operating system and the languages programs were written in the speed of the PERQ ranged from 1 3 of the speed of a DEC VAX 11 750 to the same speed as a VAX 11 750 when the PERQ was running microcode for Spice LISP The original PERQ 1 systems were not the most reliable computers ever made you could not always depend on them to boot up on the first throw of the switch It was almost as though the machines had to be in the proper mood to be booted and this tempermentality was enough to make one want to boot a PERQ in a different sense of the word However once the PERQ was of the right frame of mind to be booted or after several attempts at booting it or after the boards were reseated it would spring to life ready to manipulate graphics displays with amazing speed and agility Aside from the afformentioned unpredictable reliability the primary drawbacks to the early PERQs were the small writable control store 4K small memory 256K although 1 MB was an available option limited disk space 12 to 24 Megabytes using relatively slow and noisy 14 Shugart SA 4000 series hard disks Although these disks were slow and noisy they were durable and had a clear cover that let you watch the arm and platters move if you removed the PERQs front cover this was something that could make the PERQs fun to use as long as you were careful not to put your fingers in the wrong place and risk getting yourself electrocuted The next step i
11. Internal company documents showed that it was possible to make certain changes such as replacing the PERQ1s 14 hard disk with one of the newer albietless reliable 8 hard disks this merely required the use relatively simple special interface circuitry However although possible it does not appear that this was ever an option offered to PERQs customers On the other hand customers were able to upgrade the CPU and memory of their PERQ1s to 2 Megabytes of RAM and a 16K writable control store Although PERQ Systems changed the type of hard drives used over the years they continued to use 8 floppy drives Shugart model 801 and appeared to be reluctant to supply streamer tape drives for use by their customers The tape drives were originally intended for internal company use only customers gained the use of the tape drives after finding out that they were already in use by PERQ Systems and requested that they be allowed to use them Aside from the streaming tape drive there were plans to use other types of tape drives with the PERQ such as 9 track reel to reel tape drives which could be interfaced to the system in several ways a connection to the GPIB port and through a connection to a multibus board Over the years through various model changes the basic PERQ archi tecture remained basically the same a processor whose heart was a bit sliced horizontally microprogrammed micro engine based on the AMD 2900 chip further technical d
12. MDO A part of the memory highway micro addressing section 129 e microcode assembler e microcycle The amount of time that it takes the microengine to execute one micro instruction One microcycle on a PERQ takes 170 ns e microengine e micro instruction The format of a PERQ microinstruction is 8 8 3 111 4 2 4 8 4 4 DICIT 4 44 44 4444 Y A IBIWIHIALU F SF Z CND JMP CREE 4 44 44 4444 gt The twelve fields if the horizontal microinstruction have a total width of 48 bits Each of these microinstructions is a sequence of phrases produced by the microassembler from one or more instructions The PERQ microengine executes each microinstruction in one microcycle 170 ns H The hold field When the hold bit is set I O devices are pre vented from accessing memory ALU ALU field encodes the function that the ALU uses to combine its A and B inputs F Function field controls interpretation of the contents of the SF and Z fields micro instruction beats micro instruction register micro instruction results microprogram micro sequencer 130 CHAPTER 24 GLOSSARY OF PERQ CPU TERMINOLOGY micro state register UState microstate condition codes microword field mill function multi length operations multiplexor multiply step hardware NextOp Opfile BPC NMI non maskable interrupt non conditional interrupt non maskable interrupt NMI
13. The error is deceptively simple a range check But I think it s leading to a memory allocation problem which is pointing me towards a data struc ture the Ethernet packet itself that isn t getting allocated and intitialized properly even though the routine that does that is getting invoked CL Nov 30 1992 38 7 Eth Can board Another interesting tidbit when you add an Eth Can board to a T2 with an EIO board you should in theory have a machine with two working Ethernet interfaces The OSLAN A tap on the bulkhead is wired to the EIO slot and the Eth Can should drive the OSLAN B tap That would allow you with software support to set up gateway machines and partition large networks into more manageable subnets I ve never seen nor heard of a single line of code that would let you do that but it is a nice thought CL March 31 1993 38 8 Ethernet Connections You have to have the proper pigtail cable to turn the connector on the back of the machine into a regular AUI cable that can be connected to a thick wire MAU On the PERQ 1s the 1 0 OPTION connector on the back is approximately 50 pins or so the normal pigtail turns that into a 15 pin connector that you connect to the transceiver If you also have a laser printer there s an even more unique double ended cable that splits the 1 0 OPTION connector into both ethernet and laser printer connectors On the T2 you actually have two OSLAN connectors The
14. configuration under which the PERQ communicates with the main frame e Dirk Kalp 37 1 INDIVIDUALS 175 Brian Koma at Burston Marsteller contact for Accent announcement May 15 1984 412 456 2500 What was Burston Marsteller An authorized dealer J Stanley Kriz co authored the PERQ Color Display Concept Doc ument designed the Kriz tablet went on to MegaScan Art Lim C Lindsay testcontrol pas J M Loveluck amp F R A Hopgood from Rutherford Appleton Lab SERC wrote The ICL Three Rivers PERQ and Distributed Interac tive Computing April 1983 Ed Maples Brad Myers Author of the a lot of the PERQ s graphics software as of Dec 1992 he had a PERQ according to Brian Rosen K KING of TETRIS Nakemura Supervised writing of PERQ Tetris 1989 Joe Novak Geoff Potter George Robertson Worked on IP TCP for POS around D 6 Brian Rosen Creator of the PERQ Joe Schmidt ICL Kwok W Sheh wrote some PERQ microcode and a tribute to that uCode David Stoner co authored the PERQ Color Display Concept Docu ment Stoney John Strait Wrote a LOT of the PERQ software and SIM Syn chronous Register Transfer Simulator A lot of the software he wrote was low level coding such as microcode It appears that he and Brian Rosen wrote most of the original PERQ microcode John Strait wrote Prose 176CHAPTER 37 VARIOUS NAMES OF PEOPLE ASSOCIATED WITH PERQS e John Stra
15. graphics and text data bases 5 8 PORTING POS CODE TO ACCENT 47 e networks ranging from one workstation to hundreds of workstations servers and other CPUs from multiple vendors Automated prepress systems must by definition be easily expandable at low cost and must provide ease of interfacing specialized devices The network philosophy and transparency provided by Accent when coupled with Ethernet provides the backbone for acheiving both objectives 5 8 Porting POS Code to Accent I presume they just didn t have the manpower and time and money to make Accent have a POS compatible shell or be able to detect POS binaries and run them in a special mode There s nothing in Accent that would prevent that and in fact it would be a neat project Obviously old POS programs would have to be forced to run under Sapphire and use Accent style device handling but by writing new versions of the old standard POS libraries screen memory io etc that simply mapped the POS calls to the proper Accent server or the kernel you can basically fool the old programs into behaving themselves They d run a bit slower of course if they were highly rasterop intensive since most POS programs always assume they can blast bits wherever they want without any overhead of a windowing system But I don t think the technical issues would be that overwhelming if there was time and energy to do it CL Oct 10 1992 I believe that we thought
16. mm eee Ue dui due Las AO d etas meh nn 229 48 11 PERQ1 vs PERQ2 Floppy Drives 229 48 12Exploding Capacitors on CPU 230 48 13Exploding PERQ 1 Motor Start Capacitors 230 48 14Slipping Drive Belts 230 49 S E R C 231 50 Serial Input Output 233 50 1 PERQ RS 232 22 2 02 A EG 234 SEE karte ran la De 234 51 PERQ Software 235 51 1 Interr pts ss a2 e Ro AE e rm Ren EOS e a 235 51 2 Known Operating 236 51 3 BERQ Pascal uns owe Beim e NI a prd 236 51 4 Microcode Microprogramming 236 51 5 PERQI vs PERQIA programming 2 22 2200 239 SLG Mint i uo eee Pre Ba RE NEE qu e 239 51 7 na Fatih ROS NR Br dut LINDA qd Res 239 51 8 PERQ POS Software Written Being Written by Malcolm Shute239 52 PERQ Solar OS 241 53 PERQ Power supply specs and system dimensions etc 243 53 Ll EN3000 32 a Ao Eat edo t uem 243 54 PERQ Speech Synthesizer 245 54 1 How Sound is Recorded onto a PERQ 246 10 55 PERQ Tablet 56 Technical Miscellany 57 PERQ User Groups 57 1 TRUST 5 2 ek A ER Res 57 2 Oxford PERQ User Group 58 PERQ uses 59 PERQ Virtual Memory System 60 OSLAN and OSLAN Interface Controller 61 PERQ Haters 61 1 Replies to CMU PERQ Haters 61 2 Miscellaneous Mutterings 61 3 New Mailing List Re Launche
17. operating system kernel and the layers people have been developing on top of it bsd Unix PC and Mac emulators prove that CL 1992 Tronically I ve gort a 400 dpi Canon printer connected to this NeXTcube and guess what It works just the same way raw Canon interface The only difference is that the Perq never had a PostScript interpreter so the output was always a bit more crude than the NeXT produced CL March 31 1993 205 206 CHAPTER 40 PERQ VS NEXT Chapter 41 PNX PERQ UNIX e The PNX system s intermediate level instructions are in C code e UNIX was adopted as the SERC Common Base Policy standard e POS is still used to format a hard disk to be used by PNX I think this is true but should be checked out to make sure e An implementation of UNIX which would permit a natural evolution to future enhancements such as distributed operating systems in which the OS is distributed over a number of processors interconnected by local and or wide area networks Not only special services but also processing power is distributed around such a network e Maintains full compatibility with Version 7 UNIX a full implementa tion of V7 e 32 bit arithmetic e paged 32 bit virtual addressing with a flat address space e Satisfied a requirement of the SERC Common Base Policy that all language implementations should be interworkable at the system call level in order to allow mixed language programming and o
18. this had front ends for both the VME and PC AT buses In 1990 1991 MegaScan was sold to a company in Massachussetts and will be moving there MegaScan produces a 300 dpi monitor with 3 000 x 4 000 resolution at a 70 Hz non interlaced scan rate Another company Connor Scelza Associates was formed by Don Scelza and Gerry Connor technical and management leaders on software respectively from Perq Systems Mars Microsystems was founded by Brian Rosen Note that the name of this company is the same as the code name of the PERQ 3B a system which PERQ Systems would have produced had they stayed in business Mars Microsystems now manufactures an IBM PC AT based machine that has a SPARC processor manufactured by Tatung This system uses an AT type bus which accepts a board containing an Intel 80386 microprocessor this board is used for the MS DOS operating system A seperate high speed bus is used for the machines video and memory MS DOS output is redirected to the main video memory and it is possible that this machine uses some sort of shared memory configuration The main operating system is Sun OS Note that a Sun OS like Unix OS was also planned for the Perq 3B by Perq Systems Corp 2 20 1997 July 1987 As of July 1987 the Spice Rack at CMU no longer contains any PERQ hardware the PERQ stuff has been replaced with Lisp machines and SUNs 2 21 Things whose time period is questionable Probably sometime in the early to m
19. 20 bits wide and performs 17 functions The ALU combines its and B inputs according to the data contained in the ALU field of the microinstruction Functions of the ALU include A B NOT A NOT B AND B AND NOT A NAND B OR B OR NOT B NOR B gt gt gt gt gt 125 126 CHAPTER 24 GLOSSARY OF PERQ CPU TERMINOLOGY A XOR B A XNOR B A B A B 0ldCarry A B A B OldCarry Note that OldCarry is the carry from the microinstruction which im mediately preceeds the present microinstruction It is used for multiple precision arithmetic The micro instruction results that the ALU produces are buffered for use as 1 input for source operand register 2 data in and memory address 3 1 O bus data and address The result R output is fed back into the XY registers and to the memory address registers and the memory data output If the hold bit is set the contents of R are written to the register specified in the microinstruction s X field If the hold bit is reset no XY registers will be changed e arithmetic operations e assembler see microcode assembler e B side of ALU e base register e bit boundaries e BMux e BPC byte position counter e BPC byte program counter e byte position counter BPC e byte program counter BPC 127 buffer bus C code call stack central processor unit CPU computable goto CPU central processor unit data in distributed multiplexors divide
20. 3 PERQ CURSOR FILES 137 thing to appear is a large strawberry and some closing messages I think the name of the company that created it is something like Painted Lady Software and the author was apparently heavily involved in the AUDRE project 26 3 Perq Cursor Files Once I tore apart the busy bee image I think there were only a couple bytes of header 3 maybe 7 and the image no compression or run length encoding Maybe the file format is byte data 0 magic number maybe not 1 width 2 height T Brusehaver mailing list Nov 30 1992 26 4 SPic SPic is a picture file viewer that displays large scrollable picture files un der POS These files are not standard PERQ pic files and they have no extension Come to think of it Sun raster files have no extension either and are scrollable I wonder could this be the viewer needed for viewing such files on a PERQ have to test this The files that I ve found so far are titled Florida Floridal Florida2 Heather Sandcastle and Vanessa all of the girls have their clothes on There was also an XSPic run file but no accompanying seg or pas file What was the difference between SPic and XSPic 138 CHAPTER 26 PERQ GRAPHICS Chapter 27 PERQ I O RS 232 GPIB speech etc 27 1 PERQI I O The IO channel multiplexes 4 high bandwidth network disk and two op tional controllers devices which can deliver 10 M bits per second to each devic
21. A multi processing operating system with network wide 32 bit memory addressability It incorporates a hierarchical file structure and supports demand paging diskless nodes and multiple languages such as C FORTRAN and Pascal Conceived from the beginning to be a portable operating system the first release of Accent supports the PERQ Systems line of high performance graphics workstations Window manager supports the covered window paradigm supporting as many as 64 different windows on the screen simultaneously Windows can also be overlapped Status reporting icons provide current performance information to the user According to Aaron Coleman PERQ Systems president these icons differe from others currently available from other manufacturers they show the user exactly what process is occuring and provide information or prompts It s one of the ways in which we allow users to get maximum performance from out systems Transparency means that when a user calls on a process residing on an other machine in the network Accent will respond as if the function resided on the user s machine The user won t need to know where functions reside in the network Coleman System functions on the LINQ network are activated by sending mes sages to the appropriate server process through the Accent kernel The kernel provides low level support for the operating system by managing in terprocess communication Allows optimal software developmen
22. All devices listen to every packet of information transmitted This is a baseband system The OSLAN transmission rate is 10 million bits per second 10 MBits The ICL OSLAN is like Ethernet It is a contention network using broad cast techniques The method of accessing the network is called CSMA CD That is carrier sense multiple access collision detection CSMA is some times called listen before transmission CSMA CD is sometimes called listen while transmitting as well as listening before 259 260 CHAPTER 60 OSLAN AND OSLAN INTERFACE CONTROLLER Chapter 61 PERQ Haters Those Dreadfully Nasty CMU and other PERQ Haters Andreas G Nowatzyk on July 29 1993 wrote Hmm I really like to know how and why I was added to this mailing list I hope that PERQ is not refering to the machine that was produced by Three Rivers Corp in Pittsburgh PA in the early 80s That machine the Poorly Engineered Reduced Quality PERQ computer was deployed to the tune of 150 units in our computer science department at the Carnegie Mellon university where it managed to become the most hated contraption on campus The best use we ever found for it was to use it as a door stop Most were sold for scrap metal to the tune of 5 a piece some were still in thier original package never opened I think CMU got a good deal So kindly remove me from this list Let the desd rest in peace Andreas Richard Sanzi on July 29 199
23. Completes Long awaited Deal Accent Systems SIM Synchronous Register Transfer Simulator V2 5 by John Strait Sept 25 1984 6 pages SMD disk module documentation file smd doc Sparc like Stations Hobble Into Sunlight Mars Specification Document POS Pascal IO Specification project name POSF2CIO Nov 12 1982 third draft by August G Reinig 36 pages Specification for High Voltage Power Supply PERQ 3 file hvpsspec Specification for High Voltage Power Supply PERQ 3 file hvpsint State of the Newspaper Market from Both Sides of the Atlantic QED Agfa Crosfield 116 CHAPTER 20 PERQ DOCUMENTS CATALOGED THUS FAR Survivor of Wilmot s Carnage Eyes Top ICL Job mentions PERQs The Symbolic Debugger for POS G 4 Pascal 1 page Tablet Test Procedure PERQ 3 file tablettestproc Tablet Theory of Operation PERQ 3 file tablettheory tape documentation 9 track file tape doc tape drive controller initialization documentation 9 track file mt drv doc TAR documentation file tar doc TAR program help file tar hlp TCP bugs file tcp bugs Theory of Operation of the P3MCNTL Wirewrap Board also known as the WWSIB PERQ 3 file theoryopp3mctl Theory of Operation for Memory Board file memtheory operation Theory of Operation of the P3MCNTL Wirewrap Board also known as the WWSIB PERQ 3 file topp3 Theory of Operation of the P
24. International Standards Organization ISO model which divides the communications functions and services of networks into seven levels the Transport Service Level provided over a Cambridge Ring is the Transport Service Byte Stream Protocol TSBSP This allows for a trans parent extension from the local Cambridge Ring to the SERC s X25 wide area network or to other networks As of April 1983 a basic block inter face for the TSBSP protocol to the Cambridge Ring has been written to run under POS and a version for PNX was being devised DICE Distributed Interactive Computing Environment a term from the SERC and RAL Sounds similar to CMU s SPICE 38 6 Getting TCP IP Working Chris Lamb found that the TCP IP software compiled under Accent S6 after fixing some compiler errors However when it is run it enters the 38 7 ETH CAN BOARD 185 debugger way down deep in the Ethernet code CL Aug 31 1992 Right now I ve successfully compiled the TCP IP suite under Accent 56 but it crashes and enters the debugger when I try to send out the first packet deep in the Ethernet driver so got some real fun debugging to do CL Oct 22 1992 I m concentrating on Accent now and may tackle POS later the code seems to be written such that changing a couple of booleans in a module or two will turn on the proper conditional compilation switches and the same source files will compile under POS CL Oct 22 1992
25. It is provided as a compatibility module in order to support the K1 hardware with little modification of system software above the level of DiskIO0 284CHAPTER 62 INTERESTING NOTES FROM POS G 2 SOURCE CODE From diskio pas change log March 17 1981 Removed partition kind node What was a node partition RDD From initialshell pas in procedure ProcessCommandEntry Abstract Processes a line of the profile and makes a command entry A line must have the form string to adjust setdefault screensize commandname helpinfo execute Bool Bool integer string 25 string Parameters Entry a string read from profile file Side Effects Appends an entry at the front of CmdList From diskio pas directory is an ordinary file which contains SegIDs of files along with their names Directories are hash coded by file name to make lookup fast They are often sparse files ie contain unallocated blocks between allocated blocks The file name is a SimpleName since a directory can only contain entries for files within the partition and thus device where the directory itself is located DirEntry packed record InUse boolean true if this DirEntry is valid Deleted boolean true if entry deleted byt not expunged Archived boolean true if entry is on backup tape UnUsed O 17777 reserved for later use ID SegID Filename SimpleName end 285 Was some sort of backup progra
26. March 28 1981 Changed length of command line to 255 characters On November 17 1980 code was added for LastFileName which allows a user to supply the name of a file only once for the editor compiler and linker System Pas is basically code which initializes POS and then goes in to a loop alternately running Shell and user programs it also logs users in 278CHAPTER 62 INTERESTING NOTES FROM POS G 2 SOURCE CODE From SystemDefs pas Nov 17 1982 change log Planned to eventually introduce a debugging compiler under POS Also if when we release a debugging compiler under POS the modules QMapDefs and SymDefs will need this Note this was the compiler directive flag under Accent set to false for POS From Virtual pas The PERQ virtual memory manager supervises the segment tables and exports procedures for swapping memory segments Virtual is the portion of the PERQ memory manager which must remain memory resident at all times PERQ physical memory is segmented into separately swappable items called segments which may contain either code or data From Virtual pas change note of February 24 1981 Allow the ScreenSeg to change sizes To allow this the memory manager must prevent system segments those with RefCount gt 1 from being moved into the area of memory which might be used for the Screen This is a hack which guarantees that the system can expand the screen to its orig
27. PQOS Within about a year or so ICL added the Landscape monitor as an option British Telecom Industries in Felixtowe England was looking for a ma chine to market under their name which was to use a lot of customized software Apparently this was a Perq 1 T A who had the job of deter mining which machines were the easiest to use had this to say about the Perq I was supposed to see which were easy to use The Perq was the funnest and most unlikely it cost a fortune of the lot you could draw pic tures and everything I had to demonstrate this machine that couldn t be relied on to boot the same way twice to the deputy director of BT 2 15 1983 1984 PERQ was losing market share to Apollo and Sun workstations to counter this ICL decided to develop a version of System V BF Unix for it this provided an improved window manager and networking provided multiprocessing and added a C compiler The ICL office in Bracknell was where the Perqs were supported from Note I called there this past fall Fall 1990 and was told that PNX was about to be discontinued 4 believe this was March of 82 since the article said last March and it was written in Aug 83 2 16 1984 23 Due to the slowness of the Accent kernel on the PERQs ICL had to do a quick amp dirty implementation of PNX in order to sell it to UK universities VP PNX was not originally intended to be used outside of UK universities For t
28. Registers 16 11Expression Stack 16 120P Registers 16 13R ster Op sooo Aon 16 14Micro state register Con nn 16 5S5hift M trie 2 i o e UR EORR RE 16 16Micro Instruction 16 17Micro State Register ee 16 18Byte Position Counter BPC 17 Design 18 PERQ Mass Storage Disk amp Tape 18 1 Fixed Disc Drive Controller 5 1 4 and 8 discs 18 2 Shugart SA4000 series hard disk PERQ1 18 3 Floppy Shugart SA851 or 858 18 4 PERQ2 T1 8 35 Meg Micropolis 1200 Hard Disk 18 5 PERQ1 and PERQ2 with 14 and 8 hard disks 18 6 PERQ T 2 5 1 4 hard disk drives 18 7 PERQ T 2 MW Multibus 18 8 SMD Disk Drive 2 on En nn 18 9 Tape controller 94 18 10Streaming tape controller 2 2 2 nn nn 18 11 Tape drive Hrack 18 12Streaming cartridge tape drive 18 13Adding a Second Hard 18 14Adding a SCSI interface for Disc or Tape 79 80 81 82 83 83 84 84 84 85 85 85 86 86 87 87 87 87 87 89 6 CONTENTS 19 PERQ Display 103 19 1 Display Control 2 2 2 oo En 104 19 2 Video Signals dc eel ae Rn ae VS 104 19 3 PERQI Display o s
29. and delivered at that time In California some people at Stanford University who were very knowl egable about Altos designed an advanced graphics computer terminal which they intended to use with a VAX running Berkley Unix They intended for this to be the worlds most advanved front end for a VAX running BSD In essence this terminal contained the features of a workstation and they named it the Stanford UNiversity Terminal or SUN and licensed its design to three companies The most well known of which is Sun Microsystems find out the names of the other two Sun Microsystems then started pro ducing low end workstations entry priced at low 8900 for a system with no disk no software and no networking capability Unlike Three Rivers SUN used a lot of off the shelf parts and was able to bring their systems to market more quickly than Three Rivers was able to Finally was this in 19817 Xerox allowed the Dolphin to be marketed it was sold with software called Interlisp which was developed at PARC The Dolphin Dorado and Dandilion all running Interlisp or Smalltalk were now being marketed by Xerox s Electro Optic Systems division These systems primarily competed with the MIT Lisp Machines Summer 1981 Three Rivers shows its first profit August 1981 After a suggestion from SERC ICL entered into an agreement with Three Rivers in which it would manufacture and market the PERQ in the UK and in Europe This deal gave ICL the mark
30. and scrolled all under user control 212 CHAPTER 42 POS PERQ OPERATING SYSTEM e windows can overlap each other and can be as large as the entire screen or as small as a postage stamp e Provides facilities for the subdivision of the display into a number of different areas or windows This permits the display of graphical information in a designated window and provision is made for the creation deletion and modification of the size and position of these windows Using a RasterOp procedure it is possible to develop an enhancement which allows windows to appear to move over each other while preserving the display beneath The use of windows permits the user to selectively display items from a considerable quantity of textual and graphic information in much the same way as one would select from material laid out on an office desk POS makes very efficient use of the PERQ s unique features and was designed specifically for the PERQ Provides facilities for microcode supported line drawing Although the graphics primitives available on the PERQ are evidentally very powerful tools it was felt by who ICL that there was a need for a graphics application package A basic graphics package for the PERQ was being developed by ICL what was the name of this package GRAFIKS In addition ICL and the SERC were collaborating on the implementation of the Graphics Kernel System GKS version 7 2 on the PERQ as of April 1983 a library of grap
31. are particularly welcome if they are willing to learn from us old timers while we are still lucid Your experience with hardware technologies delay lines drums tapes valves early transistors card and tape readers and punches etc Do you have early programs either tape cards or coding sheets which you are willing to share by copying Your willingness to help with recording the history of computing Your willingness to help with restoration of computers Ask him if he has a recent issue of Resurrection for you to sample Sorry very few of us have email access so we have to work via postal service I have not seen any other newsgroups to cross post this to folklore is not quite the right one If anyone has any other ideas I d be glad to cross post 70 CHAPTER 12 COMPUTER CONSERVATION SOCIETY Chris P Burton not far from Oswestry Shropshire UK Chapter 13 Real T me Clock A crystal controlled clock calendar chip MSM5832 with battery backup is used The lithium battery s shelf life is approximately four years The clock is set during board test and can be set again on site using a special tool Note a 3 6 volt lithium battery is used The circuit allows the PERQ CPU to request the date and time from the Z80 system thus removing the need for operator entry when logging in 13 1 Setting up the real time clock Setting up the real time clock on the PERQ2 EIO board can be done as follows using the re
32. assets all of which remained under lock and key until the lawyers battled things out and it was finally decided that the remaining inventory of what was Accent Systems was to be liquidated The landlord Real Estate Enterprises was not all that interested in the PERQs and they were in a hurry to reclaim the space taken up by the PERQ stuff so that they could rent it out to someone else At this point only one employee remains from PERQ Dave Callen An Accent Systems employee and former PERQ employee to help them liquidate the remaning PERQ related equipment The sign in the office window of what was Accent Systems now reads Woe Is Me Inc Before PERQ Systems went under a new system was in the design stages the PERQ 3 This system ended up being designed under contract for Crosfield Electronics Ltd which was an English company When Perq went under late 1985 Crosfield Electronics purchased the rights to the engineering designs for a machine referred to as the PERQ 3B or the PERQ 5 in various documents this system was in the midst of development when Perq Systems closed up shop Note that Crosfield Electronics helped to set up two small companies which were to help finish the development of a color graphics workstation formerly known as the PERQ 3B These two companies were Brian Rosen s MegaScan Technologies which was to work on the Perq 3 s hardware and Connor Scelza Associates CAS which was to work on the software
33. be extremely careful when duplicatng a set of floppies Duplicate DupBoot and PNXDup must all be restarted executed for each different floppy duplicated Do not insert the next floppy to be duplicated into the drive until you have stopped and restarted the utility The reason for this is that these utilities attempt to keep duplicating the same floppy multiple times until the program is terminated Duplicate This works with all floppies with the following exception it may not duplicate a FastBoot floppy properly DupBoot This is used to duplicate a FastBoot floppy PNXDup This is used to duplicate PNX file system floppies 193 Streamer Tape Drive The streamer tape drive is used mainly to copy entire disks or partitions to a tape However it can be tricked into copying only a subdirectory if you tell it that a subdirectory is a partition You cannot use this trick to restore data to a subdirectory on the hard disk Each DC300 or DC300XL tape will hold a maximum of about 20 megabytes of data no matter what the length of the tape Backing up data using the Accent S5 version of Stut does not work very well at all times If the partition to be backed up is accessible by POS then use POS for your backup or re boot to a different version of Accent for the backup Otherwise you may be in for a lot of error messages such as those buffer allocation problems errors reading buffers etc IMPORTANT Prior to
34. design of the front cover was slightly different and the ICL 2 systems did not have a recessed power switch and would have been easier to accidentally turn the power off 34 1 1 PERQ LN3500 PERQ AI PERQ T2 hardware implements a version of Common Lisp that is specially suited to the needs of the Artificial Intelligence community 34 1 2 PERQ Color Workstation a system that illuminates layouts or designs in up to 256 colors from a palette of over 16 7 million 34 1 3 PERQ Audre Still basically a T2 Audre stands for ADvanced Digitizing and REcognition The software for the Audre system is by a company named Audre Inc 163 164 CHAPTER 34 PERQ MODELS a system which offers advanced optical digitizing capabilities across a network 34 1 4 Notes Note the PERQ Color Workstation LN3500 PERQ AI and the PERQ Audre are all configuration options of the PERQ LN3000 line was this nomenclature confusing to customers prospective customers Note Circuit breaker service was hazardous and difficult cabinet was redesigned to mount circuit breaker to frame was this new cabinet the T2 cabinet Note PERQ 1 cabinet had a problem with paint adhesion Differences between PERQ 1 and PERQ 2 systems PERQ 2 is e more than 15dB quieter e dissipates less heat e produces less E M radiation e has a low profile ergonimically designed keyboard e a landscape monitor is available e 16K WCS is standard e 2
35. e progress bars in both the icon and window title e over 100 utilities oh really e virtual terminal emulation what does this mean e Accent architecture can be divided into three basic levels Accent kernel co equal environments Accent window manager 5 1 The Accent Kernel Accent employs a small kernel n Accent process consists of e a 32 bit virtual address space process state e process state including the state of any macrocode and microcode registers 5 1 THE ACCENT KERNEL 43 e access to one or more port capabilities An Accent port is a kernel managed and protected simplex communica tions channel Message passing is the sole means of communication in Accent both process to process and process to kernel One of the Kernel s main functions is to handle the interprocess com munication IPC Most other operating system functions are provided by sending messages through the IPC facility to server processes Server processes may reside on the local machine or may be accessed through the network Neither the client process nor the server process ever needs to know that the partner in the transaction is not on the local machine Provides priority scheduling with preemption and aging an aging algo rythm automatically lowers the priority of a compute bound process thus allowing fast response for highly interactive processes This is a typical sit uation found in makeup situations where compute
36. evaluate expressions 16 12 OP Registers Also known as the OP file The operation registers are loaded from memory with eight Q or C code bytes The eight bytes are addressed sequentially by a 4 bit byte position counter BPC and made available to the A side of the ALU The most significant bit of BPC indicates that the OP register needs refilling and is employed by the microcode as a jump condition The first byte of each Q or C code instruction is used by the micro sequencer to form the start address of the micricode that executes it Is a special 8 x 8 RAM into which opcodes and operands that are part of the instruction byte stream are buffered Is loaded 16 bits at a time from the memory data inputs Its output is 8 bits wide and can be read via AMux or can be sent to the micro addressing section for opcode dispatch Its read port is addressed by the 3 bit or 4 bit BPC Note that some documentation says the BPC is 3 bits wide and other documentation says that it is 4 bits wide 16 13 Raster Op The Raster operation RasterOp function is supported by special hardware The RasterOp function manipulates on bit boundaries areas of the memory holding the display screen areas windows Part of this hardware also allows the manipulation of ALU results Items of 16 bits may be shifted left or right 0 to 15 positions and masked within one micro instruction time of 170 nS CPU Has special processor hardware and microcode known
37. eventually use it most a 3RCC mk2 running Accent as a benchmark for Common Lisp It was all a very long time ago and fear a lot hasn t stuck in my memory Robert Rae 2 2 PERQ History as Otherwise Researched 2 3 Late 1960 s Note I recall reading in some computer magazing about someone else who developed a workstation with a mouse prior to the one at XEROX PARC it was probably in an issue of Byte Computer Shopper Radio Electronics etc There was a black amp white picture of some man sitting in front of the system that he had designed I know that I did see this article and am not dreaming this This was possibly not a true workstation but it was possibly the predecessor of all workstations since it was the first successful graphics system for CAD type stuff or somesuch At Xerox s Palo Alto Research Center PARC in the late 1960 s work on the supposedly first computer workstation began This was an undertaking which would take several years of research and a great deal of money being invested in the project The name of this system being designed was the Alto In those days a computer workstation was unheard of and Xerox was designing the Alto The Alto had a 10 Megabyte disk drive 64K of memory and a lot of interfaces The use of a mouse and complex audio speaker system and synthesizer with computers began here The basic idea for this workstation was for a user to be able to drag around a two dimension
38. have fond memories of using them in days gone by The group of present PERQ users would greatly benefit from the ability to draw on this larger pool of advice and past PERQ users would have the benefit of having a forum in which they could exchange reminiscences this would also be of benefit to the present PERQ users No existing groups cover the use and maintainance of PERQ workstations Therefore the discussion of matters pertaining to PERQs falls primarily under two umbrella groups comp sys misc and alt folklore computers Neither group really applies specifically to the users of PERQs Additionally other newsgroups which pertain primarily to graphics workstations are for the most part used by the users of systems which are presently manufactured and supported by the manufacturers Many of the readers of such workstation specific newsgroups may not have an interest the PERQs and we d be taking up unnecessary net resources by posting out PERQ related information in such groups TT The reason we feel that this newsgroup should be in the alt hierarchy rather than the comp hierarchy is to attempt to determine if a comp sys perq newsgroup is justified which we hope that it will be However the creation of a comp sys perq newsgroup would only be justified if we can locate on the net an order of magnitude greater than we have at present contributors to the group consisting of present PERQ users experts past users past expert
39. housekeeping tasks for the I O devices Microcode for the disk for example implements device control block DCB dequeing buffer manipulation track seek operations etc Using microcode in this manner reduces controller complexity significantly Ths disk controller itself is comprised of less than 40 integrated circuits e l he CPU is a horizontally microprogrammed processor with a 48 bit wide microword e The processor includes a 256 word dual ported general purpose file a 16 level hardware implemented expression evaluation stack and barrel shift and mask logic e Special hardware in the processor provides an extremely efficient mech anism for emulating byte coded instruction sets Simple 1 byte instruc tions can execute in a single microcycle e Hardware support for the RasterOp bit manipulation primitave allows bit addressed raster data to be streamed at 64 bits per memory cycle e The microprogram sequencer implements two way and multiway con ditional branches loops and micro subroutines with a 4 level call stack e In order to service the needs of the I O controllers the micropro grammed processor can be interrupted microinterrupt which is im plemented with a multiple priority zero overhead change of microstate e The CPU is designed to be user microprogrammed This means that the whole system architecture can be changed for efficient performance of particular operating systems or languages to become for example
40. if the system was to run PNX pronounce how you want but usually P N X ICL s v 7 unix I assume that eventually there were more than 500 in GB there were certainly Perqs in NI Charles Curran PERQ Fanatics mailing list July 30 1993 Actuallly the first one s sold to SERC had 256K RAM of which the screen took 96K and a 12MByte disk Remember the POS B2 filing sys tem but that s another story Initially the ICL Perq development team was located in Bracknell and the Perq marketing team in London Then the marketing team was moved to Slough Then ICL decided to move development to Dalkeith in Scotland all the development team bar two or three which included Nick left ICL decided to locate developemnt and marketing together in Kidsgrove AII the development team left and formed Spider Systems OWL etc and all the marketing team left to form Advent Now you understand why the Perq3 never hit the streets Graham Underwood PERQ Fanatics mailing list July 30 1993 I Chapter 50 Serial Input Output Two one for PERQ1 serial input output SIO chips provide four two for the PERQI channels which are used for e RS232 interface A PERQ2 only e Speech output and standard tablet input e RS 232 interface B e Keyboard input PERQ2 only The SIO chips and associated timer circuits are initialied with parame ters which define the protocol for each of four channels The RS 232 interface protocols ar
41. is definitely a pdp11 specific beastie it wants to talk to a Unibus It looks like a chunk of dual ported memory plus some control registers The hardware is essentially a simple minded processor you load a program for it into the dual ported memory and say go If you can find enough memory for them there is a subroutine mechanism but the GDP 1 was definitely a bit short on memory you can refresh something like 100 000 vectors before the flicker gets too bad It s not too intelligent e g no hardware coordinate transformations but it is fast Physically it is a great big HP monitor plus a couple of rackmount boxes full of electronics one for GDP itself one for memory plus a power supply You might have to put together some fresh cabling some of the bits and pieces got cannibalized for other things I think We also have the electronics less monitor for a raster color display they built probably of value mostly for spare parts in particular it has two more of the memory boxes Three Rivers was started in 1970 and incorporated in 1974 and entered the untapped workstation market in 1980 The term PERQ is derived from the word perquisite an exclusive right to added value The design philosophy of the PERQ embodies the term perquisite by providing a personal computer system that accomodates peo ple rather than one that requires people to adapt to it Note that heresay says that PERQ was an acronym for Pascal Eval R
42. little hand the 14th and 15th of January 1980 to have a look at the Perq and meet some of the people involved mainly Brian Rosen Stan Kriz Bob Spuntak and Miles Barel think we also spoke that time to Robert Sproull at CMU It was really exciting to be involved with such a new technology At that time they had assembled only five machines and don t remember any of them actually being capable of working but real soon now Our summary I hope confidentiality isn t a big issue now included the statement which would continue to stand by The PERQ software will be little and late We actually wanted a Unix box and the Unix port was not done until a lot later by ICL at Dalkeith just outside Edinburgh Unfor tunately there seemed to be collective brain failure there and they targeted the PDP11 rather than the VAX as their competition so they went for good performance for small processes They also went for separate input and output windows I think that was Nick Felisi ack s decision name the guilty party It was also handicapped as far as we were concerned at least by a UK religious intention to use token ring rather then ethernet technology so we couldn t use any existing US networking software and communications were not good So it never did fullfill its original promise but it was an IPNX 16 CHAPTER 2 HISTORY excellent graphics platform and for a short time it was the nearest we had to the future We did
43. mi croinstruction of the previous QCode If the OP file was empty the branch was to the opcode refill sequence that started a 4 word 8 byte memory read where the data was saved in the Op field The BPC was then cleared and the opcode dispatch clause re executed just answered the question of how big BPC is It is 3 bits plus an 161 162 CHAPTER 33 PERQ MICROCODE overflow bit It is implemented as a 4 bit counter but the msb is a branch condition This was different from most machines where opcode dispatch takes 2 6 instructions per opcode at least that was the case in 1979 MS BR mailing list Dec 9 1992 Horizontal microwords are wide e g 40 to 100 or more bits Each subfield controls a data function drectly and all the operations specified by the various subfields can be executed in parallel book computer structures mailing list Dec 14 1992 Whereas vertical microprograms are characterized by long sequences of narrow microwords horizontal microprograms are characterized by short in tertwined sequences of wide microwords book computer structures mailing list Dec 14 1992 Chapter 34 Perq models 1 Has either a PERQ1 or a PERQ 1A CPU PERQ 2 same as a Tl or K1 has PERQ 1A CPU PERQ T2 has PERQ 1A CPU 34 1 High performance LN3000 series PERQ LN3000 PERQ T2 hardware Note that T2 systems made in the UK by ICL had a slightly different cabinet The
44. name locate and utilize high level services in a distributed environment without being concerned with network architecture or flow control The programmer sees the network as a pool of resources which can be manipulated with simple procedure calls Together with the Ethernet local area networks XNS implements the In ternational Standards Organization ISO Open Systems Interconnect OSI model l his model describes the transfer of data or control information be tween applications residing on different machines as a seven layer process XNS implements seven protocols which together implement levels 3 4 and 5 of the OSI model 1 physical layer transmits bit stream to medium ethernet specifica tion 2 data link layer transfers unit of information to other end of physical channel ethernet specification 3 Note the ethernet specification which has been accepted as IEEE standard 802 3 defines the physical and electrical characteristics of the network as well as the access method and message deliniation rules These are denoted as layers 1 and 2 4 network layer switches and routes information At this level the Internet Datagram Protocol defines the structure and function of the fundamental unit of information the packet Each packet is treated as a separate entity called a datagram at this level The function of the Internet Datagram Protocol is to address and route these standard packets from the source application to
45. not been put into contact with him a lot of PERQ related knowledge may have been lost Without his help Bill Chris and myself may quite possibly not have gotten our PERQs into working 187 188 CHAPTER 39 PERQ KEEPER S GUIDE condition Bill von Hagen Chris Lamb Brian Rippon Advent Systens Malcolm Schute Graham Underwood Advent Systens Table of Contents What to do about the wraparound problem which occurs on the Perq s landscape monitor Replace IC 3 this is a phase lock loop PLL chip an MC14046BCP After replacing this chip it may be necessary to tweak the second pot from the back of the monitor This pot is located on the PC board near the speaker There is no easy way to exchange monitors between the Perqi and the Perg2 In order to exchange landscape and portrait monitors on a PERQ2 it will be necessary to also change the type of memory board used For example a landscape memory board is required in order to use a landscape display It is not advised to use the PERQ cabinet as the stand for the display electromagnetic fields from the monitor can damage data on the hard disk If you insist on using your PERQ in this manner as I do you should occasionally use disktest to run a non destructive reformat This rewrites all of the data back onto the hard disk as it reads it and doesn t harm anything This reformat can be safely done on systems containing Advent System s software which has been
46. off by one digit during the boot process Replacing Disk Drives On PERQ T 2 systems the standard hard disk is an ST 506 MFM type Almost any MFM disk can be used even if it isn t listed in the file Only 30 megabytes of any hard disk used with the PERQs can be used with POS unless special software provided by Advent Systems is used Any hard disk listed in the disk params file can be used easily You may also add disk drives for similar disks disks of the same family as those listed in disk params to this file There is one restriction any disk type added must be added BEFORE the last drive listed in the file otherwise the disk params file may become corrupted and unusable 192 CHAPTER 39 PERQ KEEPER S GUIDE Adding a Second Hard Disk PERQ T 2 systems running Accent or PNX can have up to two hard disk drives Under Accent the system treats them as one logical drive POS will only be able to access the second drive for it s low level utilities used for formatting partitioning etc The following illustration explains how to set up a two drive system Place Paint drawing here Duplicating Flopies The use of the Floppy utility to duplicate floppies is considerably time consuming The preferred method of duplicating floppies is via the Duplicate DupBoot and PNXBoot utilities All three utilities work in a similar fashion It is not necessary to format a floppy before duplicating it with these utilities WARNING
47. old values under POS This is so that Pascal running under Accent can still generate code for POS Jan 6 1981 First use of standard 3RCC file formats with Pascal compiler implemented by Miles A Barel From procedure ImportDeclaration file decl pas page 2 Abstract Parse IMPORT declarations Only handles IMPORTS line in original program DeclarationPart actually parses the contents of the imported segment 270CHAPTER 62 INTERESTING NOTES FROM POS G 2 SOURCE CODE Design THIS IS A HACK If a module is imported which contains no code or variable and it From errormsg pas pages 1 and 5 As of POS G 2 November 13 1982 the Pascal compiler could not handles source code longer than 32K Resulting error message Implementation restriction too much code Another interesting error message that the compiler can produce Undefined Error Pertaining to math accuracy from teh change log from lex pas Updated power of 10 table with more accurate numbers Michael R Kristofic Dec 26 1981 Incorporate the modified procedure ConvertReal which was made slightly more accurate by John Brodie for Version 7 0 of the compiler a version which was produced solely for the F O Release Scott L Brown Found in change log of expri pas for Bob Fitzgerald s V9 0f revision Cause Write Character to use Write WriteChar instead of File Char Stream PutC even when no field width is specified to prevent can
48. possibly do so more frequently if you have your monitor sitting on top of the PERQ cabinet A note in the PERQ T2 Service Guide warns Failure to observe the following can result is system data being corrupted Do not stand the display unit on top of the processor When the laser printer runs out of paper or becomes jammed when 201 performing a screen dump or using certain printing utilities the PERQ can become totally incapacitated No sequence of key presses can save you In such situations it will be necessary to press the reboot button The CXPrint software is much less likely to cause you to have to reboot than is the CPrint software In addition CXPrint doesn t waste paper like CPrint does Installing POS from Tape After loading files onto the hard disk from tape it is necessary to link all of the files You should have a command file named LinkAll cmd this will link all of the POS system files After linking files run the MakeBoot program For example MakeBoot system 6 build partitionN name This would have created made a partition named partitionN name bootable as your primary POS partition 7a boot for POS G 6 Note that if you have loaded a POS system that was originally used with a portrait display and you are using a landscape display you will only have half of a useable screen the top hale of the screen will be useable The bottom half of the screen will display graphic memory To correct this
49. refresh non interlaced displays of up to 1024 by 1280 resolution The ability to be controlled via voice as well as by a keyboard and tablet Several different graphic user interfaces GUIs A CPU which is microprogrammable on a per process basis RM 25 Sep 90 that is it is possible to have different microcode running as seperate processes For example one can be running the Accent operating system while having several processes running seperate microcode concurrently in different win dows One can have a LISP machine in one window the Unix OS running in another window and an Accent OS command line interpreter prompt in yet another window Virtual memory Ethernet networking The main concept of the PERQ was that of giving individual users the same benefits that they would gain from using a multi user mainframe or mini computer system The benefits to the PERQ approach as compared with a large multi user system was that each user would have quick response time from the system which would not be affected by any loads that other users might place on a multiuser system In addition the user would have a display capable of displaying high resolution graphics which could be quickly manipulated By having their PERQs attached together in a network the users could share files with each other and if one system connected to the network crashed few if any other users on the network would be seriously affected by the crash since they
50. run the MakeBoot utility as described above Installing POS from Floppies Installing POS from a set of floppies is more involved than installing it from tape Follow the instructions with your set of floppies there should be a set of command files to load the system etc A command file named AfterLoad should be run after files from floppies have been loaded onto the hard disk More information about this is needed Reliability 202 CHAPTER 39 PERQ KEEPER S GUIDE The Perqi was the least reliable Perq The most reliable was the Perq2 model T 2 The Perq2 T 1 s 8 hard disk was not very reliable The least reliable part of a Perq is the 1 0 board It may be a good idea to make copies of the PROMs Directory Limitations If you have more than 599 files in a directory on a system running POS you will be unable to view all of the file names Remove a few files and try again Software Some POS binaries after re linking are interchangeable between various PERQ models This is however dependant upon the versions of the operating systems used and the versions of some of the PROMS used in the PERQs For example programs written for POS F 1 will not likely run on a PERQ T 2 Logging Off You should always log off your PERQ runnng POS or Accent by typing bye with any appropriate switches WARNING as explained above in the section on disks do not use the WAIT switch with PERQ T 2 systems Unless you can t avoid it if
51. specially installed using an install disk it will not require re installation after a reformat Power supplies Power supplies in the PERQ1 systems are often a problem This is especially true if a power supply manufactured by Power Components is 189 used This type of power supply is best identified by either a label or a large white connector cable on the rear of th power supply It is rumoured that the power supplies for the PERQ2 and T 2 systems were not carefully manufactured rumour has it that they were built in Arizona and assembled by people who couldn t speak English CPU 1 0 and Memory Boards CPU Boards Q How to tell Perqi CPU boards from those for a Perq2 T 2 A The CPU s and memory in the Perqi and Perq2 T 1 T 2 are the same if the CPU uses the 16K writable control store CPU They are both 20 bit internal 16 bit external CPUs There were some 24 bit CPUs made so that 3 or 4 megabytes of memory could be used in a T 2 however they were not very common The PERQs that used these 24 bit CPUs were known as PERQ 4 systems Memory Boards The memory board will be different in a T 2 if a landscape display is used a Perq2 using a landscape display will use a landscape type memory board Note that each of the Perq models uses a different type of 1 0 board so you may not interchange 1 0 boards for most different PERQ models If possible avoid the first early versions of the landscape memory bo
52. step hardware dual ported file EStack expression stack ESTK expression stack expression stack EStack or ESTK extension bits intermediate code see also Q Code and C Code interrupts IOA I O address bus Is a part of the I O IOB I O bus The I O bus IOB connects the CPU to the I O devices It consists of an 8 bit address IOA IOD I O data bus A 16 bit bi directional I O data bus IOD which is a part of the I O bus IOB Data read from this bus is available to the A side of the ALU The ALU result is buffered for transfer to I O and memory boards through this bus 128 CHAPTER 24 GLOSSARY OF PERQ CPU TERMINOLOGY I O address bus IOA A part of the I O bus I O bus IOB I O data bus IOD A part of the I O bus jump conditions jump parameters logical operations MADR memory address registers MAR memory address registers mask MDI memory data input MDO memory data output MDX memory data input extended memory address memory address data highway MADR A part of the memory high way memory address highway The memory address highway is 20 bitsy wide When a word address is placed on this highway by the CPU or I O boards memory is ad dressed and the address gets buffered on the memory board memory address registers MAR memory cycle memory data highway memory data input MDI A part of the memory highway memory data input extended MDX memory data output
53. target field BR mailing list Dec 7 1992 Questions by Malcolm Shute answered by Brian Rosen MS Suppose to pick an absurd example had a weird application 159 160 CHAPTER 33 PERQ MICROCODE which would go N times faster if only had an XXX instruction in the instruction set The definition of XXX is that it takes two arguments I ll leave it up to you to suggest where these should be in registers in memory etc and takes one of those arguments multiplies it by 6 performs a bitwise and using the other argument and stores the result somewhere back at the origin of the former argument Could add such an instruction BR Yes MS If so how would do it Wouldn t it look like a block of microinstructions to be executed one after another Wouldn t this be vertical microcode BR You do indeed write a series of microinstructions to accomplish what you want The way you do it has nothing to do with whether you have a vertical or horizontal microinstruction set Basically a horizontal micro architecture has a wide micro word which is broken down into fields each field controlling some part of the hardware As examples the Perq has the X and Y fields which directly address the dual port registers the A dna B fields which directly control the ALU input multiplexor the ALU field that directly controls the ALU etc In a horizontal microword there can be and often are field combinations that don t make s
54. the destination 5 transport layer end to end data integrity and quality of service At this level the transport protocols provide a variety of facilities which support the reliable exchange of streams of related frames between clients on the network using the Internet Datagram Protocol These 182 CHAPTER 38 PERQ NETWORK facilities provide end to end error free communication paths flow con trol information for routing messages between networks and tools for implementing error reporting and diagnostic procedures 6 session layer coordinated interaction between end application pro cesses At this level the Courier Protocol provides the facility for making the details of network communication transparent to the user This is done by having access to remote resources structured as proce dure calls For example the transfer of data from another machine on the network would be seen by the user as a sequence of procedure calls to open a file move the data and close the file The Courier forms these call messages and transfers parameters and data using the layer 4 transport protocols 7 presentation layer provides code conversion data formatting 8 application layer selects appropriate services for the application XNS is an industry recognized standard which has been implemented on a large number of machines including IBM mainframes DEC VAX mini computers IBM PCs and dedicated function hardware such as the Xerox 8044 Pr
55. the system is hung always log off properly so as not to leave the filesystem in disarray A file appears to exist but I cannot access it or delete it What do I do to remedy this situation This often happens under Accent when you ve recently created a new partition and have not run Scavengr on the new partition before placing new files into this partition One solution is to re initialize the partition and run Scavenger then re install the files A better way is to just go ahead and run Scavenger from Accent and instruct it to rebuild the directories in the partition 203 that is causing you a problem 204 CHAPTER 39 PERQ KEEPER S GUIDE Chapter 40 PERQ vs NeXT Similarities betweem the PERQ and the NeXT computer I ve started getting into programming on my Mom s NeXT computer In another message relay some very interesting parallels between the NeXT and what the Perq was becoming I m very pleased to say that the spirit of the Perq really does live on in the NeXT CL June 9 1992 In the NeXT I see the machine the PERQ could have become The fact that it runs Mach gives it an eerie feeling but pleasant one sometimes when I read about things in the manuals that Accent was doing before Steve Jobs had even produced the Mac There are striking parallels between Accent and Mach as you d expect and it makes me feel good inside that the Perq really did make an important contribution Mach is an excellent
56. to my question about the PERQ s speech circuitry Three Rivers made a 16 bit ADC and a 16 bit DAC before we made Perq s They were intended for research into computer speech and music 16 bit converters in those days were unheard of way before CD was a dream We did is it live or is it Memorex tests with it microphone and good speaker system with a switch in one positiom you got live music In the other position you got A to D followed by D to A You could not hear the difference This in 1974 BR mailing list Dec 7 1992 4 1 Graphic Wonder In a message to Chris Lamb from Henry Spencer on Aug 1 1992 from Chris Lamb s message of Aug 7 1992 33 34 CHAPTER 4 MORE PERQ HISTORY Any interest in other products of Three Rivers I ask because we own Graphic Wonder aka GDP 1 serial number 001 3RCC s very first commer cial sale and it s in storage and slated to be disposed of The old 11 45 it was on has been spoken for but the buyer isn t vert interested in the 3RCC stuff In a message to Chris Lamb from Henry Spencer on Aug 5 1992 from Chris Lamb s message of Aug 7 1992 They tried to do the Graphic Wonder as a production item but it wasn t very successful only a few customers People wanted smarts rather than speed mostly I gather Pm definitely the contact for this and I probably know more about the thing than anyone hereabouts now The first thing to know is that this
57. uses Winchester technology e with 97 ms average access time 12 Megabyte e with 87 ms average access time 24 Megabyte SA4004 e 7 megabit sec transfer rate e as an option 24 megabyte capacity is available The SA4000 is almost entirely dependent upon the host computer for the intelligent control of the disk s mechanical operations If a LOUD terrible squeal is heard the heads may not be seeking properly due to a problem with the drive electronics Try swapping the 4 boards on the disk containg the hard disk controller ciruitry Dave Callen told Chris Lamb this Why it takes the PERQ 1 systems so long to boot in response to Mal colm s question about this and about why his disk sounds like it spins up to a faster speed and then stabilizes at a slower speed The disk drive spin up is like most disk drives when you turn it on there is an accelleration phase where the motor tries to get the disks spinning as fast as possible When the drive nears the desired speed the servo takes over and tries to keep the drive at the rated speed When the drive is near the rated speed the heads are unloaded and moved around a bit to settle them on the right place All of this makes noise As far as know it is very rare to have the disk spin too fast and then slow down Boot time is a compromise between diagnostic coverage and impa tience If you run a good diagnostic you can alert the operator to a failure before things get flakey Goo
58. 0 1994 from the PERQ Fanatics mailing list was involved at the beginning of the UK Perq saga in a rather weird way We Bill Clocksin and myself as remember in the AI department at Edinburgh were contacted around December 1979 by Bob Hopgood of the Rutherford Appleton Lab and Roger Vinni combe of ICL through Tommy Thomas of the ERCC with strict instructions not to tell anyone about anything we knew about the PERQ HISTORY AS TOLD BY THOSE WHO WERE THERE 15 As neither of us had heard of it before this was not too difficult They then told us all about it We never did find out why they thought we were already involved Remember that at that time we lived in a relatively under priviliged computing world The Department s own computing resource was one PDP 11 60 relatively recent it had been one 11 10 before that and research work had the use of a locally managed PDP 10 which served a national SERC Al community VAXen were new and wonderful was the 750 just becoming available and a VT100 on everyone s desk was a pipe dream Xerox Altos MIT Lisp Machines and Nu bus plans and the CMU SPICE project made us very jealous So the prospect of a commercially available VAX style architecture with incredible graphics capabilities at an affordable price was very attractive The result was that Rob Witty then at RAL and packed our passports and visited Three Rivers in Pittsburgh on it says in the report in my hot
59. 3 wrote Andreas is right They were nothing more than Space Heaters I remember several being plugged in and turned on with no keyboard or display attached JUST TO HEAT AN OFFICE This was unarguably their best use ever UNSUBSCRIBE me as well 261 262 CHAPTER 61 PERQ HATERS Scott Fahlman on July 29 1993 wrote Your damned mailing list daemon refuses to let me unsubscribe It must have been implemented on a Please remove me by hand and the sooner the better As a parting shot The Perq had pretty decent graphics and its Common Lisp environment was actually pretty good for its day if I do say so myself But the Perq Systems people made a lot of mistakes with that machine both technical and on the business side and we at CMU ended up paying in blood sweat and tears for every one of those mistakes You won t find a lot of nostalgia for the Perqs on this campus Federal property management regulations even made it impossible for us to enjoy the satisfying catharsis of throwing all the remaining Perqs off the roof they sat in a hallway for years and were finally trucked away to parts unknown Goodbye I hope Scott Mario Wolczko Manchester Univ on July 30 1993 wrote Above my PERQ2 when I used to use one some year ago I had a slide rule mounted with a sign that said PERQ Floating Point Accelerator I m another subecriber to the view that the only good PERQ s a dead PERQ Mar
60. 3MEZ Printed Circuit Board PERQ 3 file theoryopp3mez Theory of Operation of the WWSIB Wirewrap Board PERQ 3 file theoryopwwsib A Three processor LISP Machine Architecture Based on Statistical Analysis of Common LISP SPICE LISP Three Rivers Computer We re going to be very very big Three Years Ago Aug 5 1986 ICL dumped PERQ timings for PERQ 3 monitors file stan A Tool for Providing Programs with Menus J D Bovery Computing 117 Laboratory U K C Two Startups One Winner PERQ Apollo User Facilities a description of the userfacilities for Accent the com ments in this file describe programs that were to be part of future releases Since this was a very long Scribe file only the first to pages have been printed so far and this is where the relevant data appears to be The rest is still on disk to be printed at a later time file userfac mss Video Controller 1 3 page technical description video self test docs PERQ 3 file Vid Test Doc virtual memory test docs PERQ 3 file VMemTst Doc voltage conversion procedures 110 to 220 VAC file convert txt What the KPROC Sequencer Does PERQ 3 file memtheory operation Xerox Network Systems XNS Protocol Package for the PERQ Work station files xns pro doc xns pro 3Prose Xerox Network Systems XNS Protocol Package V1 0 Release Notes files xnsrel pro doc xnsrel pro 3Prose Xe
61. 9 SPICE Project 9 Reddy Raj 7 Rosen Brian 7 9 Edinburgh 8 Ruthorford Appleton Labs 8 ERCC 8 SERC 8 9 Felisiack Nick 9 speech 7 Sproull Robert 9 Hopgood Bob 8 Spuntak Bob 9 Sun 8 ICL 8 Dalkeith 9 Teter Jim 7 Unix 9 Thomas Tommy 8 Kriz Stan 7 9 UNIX 9 289 290 vector display 7 Vinnicombe Roger 8 Witty Rob 9 Xerox Alto 7 10 Dolphin 8 PARC 10 Xerox PARC 7 INDEX
62. Canon LBP 10 engine not the CX engine It also had a video interface A special board we designed drive it It created a data stream very much like the way the video is created for the display i ee mostly microcode and a little bit of shift register data path Brian Rosen mailing list March 31 1993 Chapter 46 PROMs I had noticed that there appears to have been some sort of PROM burn ing reading hardware that could be attached to the PERQs since I found some software used for this Brian Rosen replied to my question about this We did build a PROM blower it was wire wrapped and plugged into the Perq somewhere maybe the link socket I don t think it was serial or GPIB BR mailing list Dec 9 1992 223 224 CHAPTER 46 PROMS Chapter 47 QNIX QNIX provides a UNIX System V interface and access to System V system calls and utilities can be integrated into LINQ built upon Accent s virtual memory management file system and IPC facilities as a result QNIX users enjoy all of the benifits of full demand paging a transparent distributed file system and access to network resources complete UNIX System V environment with over 150 utilities provides System V system calls use of the network is transparent standard UNIX shell Because QNIX is built on top of Accent s virtual memory management file system and IPC facilities QNIX users have transparent access to network resources 225 226 CHAPT
63. D area r 1 829 This command tells DiskTest what area of the disk to format The last number will vary depending upon the type of disk drive that you are using This example is for an MK56 drive This is normally the number of cylinders 1 COMMAND unsafe Tell DiskTest that is permitted to proceed with something that can make permanent changes to your disk COMMAND format Proceed with the format Your screen will fill up with boxes COMMAND scan Scan for errors 197 COMMAND gt q Quit the program The disk is now formatted 5 Run newpart to initialize the disk drive and give it a name CMD gt devinit no y Enter dev name gt SYS no y CMD gt q 6 The disk is now ready to be partitioned You will again use NewPart to create partitions as necesary Creating New Partitions with NewPart The following is an example of using the NewPart program to create a partition Use the help command to see what commands are available gt NewPart CMD gt createpart initpages test boot 10080 This will create a boot partition of 10080 blocks You will repeat this command for each partition that you wish to create Use whatever mane and size that you wish with the following restrictions the partition must contain fewer than 32 768 blocks for use by wither POS or Accent and it must be a number which is the ending of a cylinder boundary Don t worry about this last part about the cylinder boundary if the num
64. EIO board drives the A port If you have an Eth Can board for the 186 CHAPTER 38 PERQ NETWORK laser printer and the Ethernet used mostly in PERQ 1s it suppos edly is wired to drive the B connector on a T2 though doubt there is any software that will allow you to gateway between two separate Ethernets Since have such a machine and since I m working on the TCP IP stuff or attempting to if had any time available may discover otherwise I m skeptical though have never read anything in any Perq literature that mentions being able to set up a PERQ as a bridge between two seperate subnets Of course if the hardware is wired together properly don t think there s any reason the I O microcode and all higher layers couldn t be enhanced to give that capability just borrowed some thick to thin transceivers from work nifty inexpensive little boxes that take a thick AUI type cable in one side from the Perq and have a BNC connector for thin wire cable on the other side As soon as lay my hands on a couple of 50 ohm terminators I ll be attempting to network my Perq 1s at home cut my teeth on CMU s 3MHz net with some Xerox Altos and 3RCC s 10MHz net out at their Advanced Development Group s office back in Pittsburgh almost 10 years ago As a kid being able to boot a machine and have it sync its clock to the Vax and print stuff over the net to a 240dpi laser printer was way way too cool Sinc
65. ENT Chapter 10 PERQ Circuit Boards Due to the weird form factor of the PERQ boards it would be very expensive to custom fabricate them Dave Callen Dave Callen said that all the scrap dealers refuse to take Perqs because apparently the circuit boards are all cadmium plated or something like that and they can t reclaim the good stuff from them There IS justice in the world They can t just dump all the remaining Perqs for scrap cause nobody will take it Hooray Chris Lamb 61 62 CHAPTER 10 PERQ CIRCUIT BOARDS Chapter 11 PERQ Bus System Communication with the input output subsystem is by means of the 16 bit bi directional I O data bus IOD Data read from the bus is available to the A side of the ALU The ALU result is buffered for transfer to I O and memory boards through the bus Both CPU and I O boards can access the memory through the memory data and address highways The CPU uses the I O data bus for display generation control The memory highway and I O data bus are used for information transfer with the CPU and memory boards I O devices are prevented from accessing memory if the hold bit of a microinstruction is set 11 1 Memory Data In MDI The 16 bit words on the memory data in highway MDI are loaded into a buffer and a parity bit for that word generated Dependent on store function 1 2 or 4 words are collected and written to the array The fixed disc and other channel controller
66. ER 47 QNIX Chapter 48 PERQ Quirks and Hints 48 1 Directory Limitations The directory command cannot list all of the files in a directory if there are more than 599 files in that directory 48 2 DDS Bug According to the PERQ T2 service guide CAUTION The DDS hardware has a fault in it which sometimes causes the number displayed to be 1 less than it should be When PERQ and DDS are working correctly DDS pauses at 10 before PERQ loads the bootstrap if the DDS bug is active DDS will pause at 9 48 3 CAUTION PERQ2 Overtemperature There is no overtemperature sensing When servicing always check e fan tray connector pushed well home e all fans are running Note that the Z80 I O circuitry supposedly contains some sort of tem perature sensing why isn t this used Was is used for the PERQI1 227 228 CHAPTER 48 PERQ QUIRKS AND HINTS 48 4 CAUTION Fan types Fans from both Etrie and Papst are used PERQ2 All four fans must be from the same manufacturer to avoid beat frequencies since the Etrie and Papst fans have different rotational speeds 48 5 Screen optical coatings Some video terminals have a special anti glare coating applied to their screens Try to avoid touching these screens If a screen is contaminated by oils from the skin use only the recommended cleaning pads to remove the oils and wipe the screen dry with a soft paper tissue or a lint free cloth I think this pertains to some of the PERQ1 display
67. ERQ2 series e The CRT scan PCB and transformers e DC power regulator or mains power unit e display unit interface panel e loudspeaker volume control and brightness controls The four display unit types are just for the PERQ2 series e The T1 portrait display F2362 22 this contains a KME assembly 80019760 powered by a 55 volts DC from the T1 processor power supply e The T2 portrait display F2362 24 this contains a KRIZ assembly 7734942 powered by 24 volts from the T2 processor power supply e The Moniterm landscape display F2362 23 assembly 7734546 with AC mains power supply input 103 104 CHAPTER 19 PERQ DISPLAY e The T2 KRIZ landscape displays not available at the time the T2 Service Guide was printed edition 1 1984 Contains a KRIZ assembly powered by 24 volts from the T2 processor supply 19 1 Display Control The CPU controls the display content by writing the required bit patterns to the display data memory area The CPU also loads parameters to the memory display logic circuits which define the memory area employed and the active screen size Param eters are updated by the CPU in response to line counter interrupts from the memory display logic circuits The screen is refreshed 60 times a second by the memory display logic circuits The refresh rate is defined by timing circuits on the board inter leaving menory accesses with external requests Display and cursor address counters mean that only i
68. ERQs were made to be used only as forms design worksations 259 256 CHAPTER 58 PERQ USES Chapter 59 PERQ Virtual Memory System note for more information refer to the brochure PERQ Virtual Memory System TRC 13 Apparently this refers to MPOS e PERQ s virtual memory system features a segmented 32 bit virtual address space mapped onto a 20 bit physical address 1 megaword e subsequent implementation of the PERQ system will implement a paging system with 256 word pages The new operators will then return a true 32 bit virtual address and the limitations of 64K segments will be eliminated 257 258 CHAPTER 59 PERQ VIRTUAL MEMORY SYSTEM Chapter 60 OSLAN and OSLAN Interface Controller These logic circuits provide the PERQ interface to an ICL open system local area network Transceiver Unit The EIO board circuits provide data encapsulation and help in the data link management A microsecond clock timer is provided to help in sorting out collisions on the network The timer is set by software and interrupts the PERQ CPU The DMA controller handles the transfer of data between the OSLAN controller buffers and the PERQ memory Separate channels are used for transmitted and received data but transfers are not simultaneous Open systems OS means that different manufacturers equipment can be connected to the LAN Every packet of information has a 48 bit header which specifies a unique destination device address
69. LTIPLEXORS 85 16 9 A and B multiplexors Distributed multiplexors select operands for the ALU from e The memory e The I O bus e The CPU internal hardware Memory data coming from the memory is sent to the ALU via the AMux 16 10 XY Registers The XY registers provide general working registers and local storage for certain Q or C code registers There are 256 20 bit registers any two of which may be addressed si multaneously from the X and Y fields of a micro instruction Registers addressed from the X field are available to the A input of the ALU Registers addressed from the Y field are available to the B input of the ALU The XY registers are loaded with selected ALU results The XY registers form a dual ported file of general purpose registers The X port outputs are multiplexed with several other sources the AMux to form the A input to the ALU The Y port outputs multiplexed with an 8 or 16 bit constant via the BMUX form the B input to the ALU The XY registers receive input from the ALU output R 16 11 Expression Stack Is a push down pop up E expression stack Is a 16 level stack Holds up to 16 20 bit items providing efficient local storage for partial results The expression stack is loaded with selected ALU results which are then available to the A side of the ALU Is written from R Is read on AMux 86 CHAPTER 16 THE PERQ CPU Is used by the intermediate code Q Code or C Code interpreter to
70. MB of memory is standard e has a battery backed up real time clock e has a flat surface pointing device active area extends to edge e faster gpib up to 170 K Baud instead of 30 K Baud e has a second rs232 channel that can operate at up to 19 200 baud 34 2 PERQ T4 Varityper 1280 24 bits 34 3 PERQ 3 and PERQ 5 Codenames Mars and Jaguar 34 4 NOTES ON PERQ MODELS FROM CHRIS LAMB 165 34 4 Notes on PERQ models from Chris Lamb Now is this the 3 that familiar with the 32 bit custom machine they were developing Or is it the Motorola 68K based system they tried to put out right as everything fell apart I swear I saw an announcement for the Perq IV touting 4MB of memory a 32 bit processor etc but I don t have the right issue of IEEE something or other from five years ago CL June 9 1992 Model designations according to Chris Lamb Oct 22 1992 were Perq 1 original machine with 4K CPU up to 1 MB RAM portrait some times refered to as the Perq 0 when 256K RAM and a 12 MB disk was standard Perg 1A Original model with 16K CPU up to 2 MB RAM portrait Still used IOP for the I O and the OIO board for ethernet Perq 2 A horrendous rush job to get the new machine out the door 8 disk interface and new cabinet design with up to 2 MB memory and 16K CPU and either portrait or landscape monitors Few of these were built and the 8 drive controllers are infamous for their flaky p
71. Memory pas page 20 The only way to address segments bigger than 256 blocks is using 281 Raster p From ODTPrq ps documenting its lineage PERQ version rewritten with lots of neat stuff added by John P Strait January 1 1981 RT 11 version Bill Glass 1978 UCSD version Miles Barel 1870 footnote This appears to be a mistake Comment found in Clock pas in part of leap year code Don t worry about 100 and 400 years PERQs won t be around that long From CmdParse pas Command names can be no longer than 80 chars From details pas Microcode can read serial number from PERQ2 but not PERQ1 where the serial number is not in hardware From Editor pas change log Special Raster p DrawByte From Editor pas change log Commend from Scott L Brown who aded the FOR extension to FSExtSearch to enable the editor to find FORTRAN files 282CHAPTER 62 INTERESTING NOTES FROM POS G 2 SOURCE CODE I do my small part to help perpetuate the dreaded illness we all know as FORTRAN From editoru pas page 21 This is HACK THis funny Raster p entry point is a three address instruction and there is no three address TLate We get away with it by 1 two TLates 2 Translate the screen address after the other two 3 Count on the fact that the screen is swappable 4 Count on the fact that the tw
72. N3000 proprietary bit slice bipolar CPU with 170 ns cycle time 82 CHAPTER 16 THE PERQ CPU e microprogrammable to optimize speed and memory usage for programs written in specific higher order languages including Pascal C FOR TRAN 77 and LISP to provide multiple instruction set architectures within a single workstation e 16K Writable Control Store e Hardware RasterOp bitmap manipulation enabling bit addressed raster data to be moved at up to 32 Mbits sec e 20 bit real address registers e hardware diagnostics implemented via microcode with results displayed automatically e proprietary processor supports multiple instruction sets simultane ously resident in the Writable Control Store This enables worksta tions to support entirely different instruction sets for LISP and other languages such as Pascal and C e 32 bit segmented virtual address space mapped onto a 20 bit physical address 16 3 Differences between the PERQ1 and the PERQ1A CPU Only the PERQIA has e 16K writable control store e 14 bit computable goto with the address coming from the processor shift output e Single precision multiply step and divide step hardware A base register for addressing the X and Y registers e A readable victim latch Ability to use a long constant in a microinstruction which pushes the expression stack The assembler reflects features of the hardware specific to the PERQI or PERQIA CPU by restricting usage of the fo
73. NQ networks to share data files and expensive pe ripherals with either other LINQ networks or with foreign networks LINQ can even be incorporated into other Ethernet compatible networks Controlled by the Accent advanced network operating system Connects workstations gateways and other manufacturers computers and devices into a sophisticated open network based on Ethernet technology A press release issued on May 15 1984 stated A new local area net work designed from the initial concept to provide a non proprietary truly distributed transparent operating environment was introduced at the Com puter Graphics 84 Show today by PERQ Systems Corp in Anaheim CA Note this was the LINQ network Using LINQ workstations various servers gateways and mainframes can be networked together Gateways allow LINQ networks to share data files and peripherals with other LINQ networks or foreign networks PERQ Systems older workstations the PERQ and PERQ 2 can also be used in a LINQ network 38 5 Cambridge Ring There are two possibilities for connecting a PERQ to a Cambridge Ring e Outbound hardware interface which is relatively inexpensive and can be connected to the PERQ s GPIB e Inboard interface which connects directly to the PERQ s I O bus and is considerably faster than the outboard interface as well as more costly 184 CHAPTER 38 PERQ NETWORK A number of local area networks had been proposed to SERC for the Comm
74. PERQ UNIX 42 POS PERQ Operating System 42 1 POS Memory Organisation 42 2 POS File Types 42 3 POS File system 42 4 POS Display Window Manager 42 5 POS D 265 42 6 POS F 2 42 7 U S versions vs U K versions 42 8 FixPart 42 9 QCode Assembler 42 10Scavenger 42 11Scrounge not reporting uncaught exceptions 42 I29hell 5 8 4 42 13Q Code intermediate code for POS 42 14Undeleting Files and Scrounge 43 PERQ Power Supplies PSU 44 PERQ Prices 45 Laser printer 46 PROMs CONTENTS 187 205 207 209 210 TI 210 3987 Pu be Was orte 211 node e ce qoe dob seta 211 pe EE EB 212 BP ah BRIN a theta 212 BAe his Banas 213 seeds E cerit he Ee GAR ris 213 I 213 eic acean file v Bon ach Litus id d nest 213 E erede ie 214 Pm 214 TEL 214 Stk A ee Boog 215 217 219 221 223 CONTENTS 9 47 QNIX 225 48 PERQ Quirks and Hints 227 48 1 Directory Limitations 227 482 DDS duo x dena a Ed 227 48 3 CAUTION PERQ2 Overtemperature 227 48 4 CAUTION 228 48 5 Screen optical coatings 2 22mm nn 228 48 6 CAUTION T1 PROCESSOR MOVEMENT 228 48 7 CPU Board PROMS Disk Drive Types 228 48 8 PERQ 1 System Warm Up 228 48 9 Undeletable 229 48 L109butu 2 06S
75. PERQ Workstations R D Davis Last Updated November 6 2003 from the Sept 7 1991 edition Contents 1 Preface and Dedication 2 History 2 1 PERQ History as Told by Those Who Were There 2 2 PERQ History as Otherwise Researched 2 8 Late LIS 4 x wei ae Aiea p ed ex EGER REG DA Cr Pro DP PE 2 9 TO TO ceri d 2 05 NOTA A ustedes eas dE bep so RU dr te 2 2 6 19 100 5 eon oe ke dol Be ee A et 2 3 1916 rd RR Ae Sle A 2 9 Eate I970 8 ee ed AA e pate 2 10 LIB sz cz en eb a E A A it DOE DALE NOT QC e ie DAD LIN A uses E A cs DAB LIS a A A ds 10838 o ish a a a da 2 15 1983 1084 nad DAGA A 5 nnd eg v TUE EI ge deo PS as bak See DEN NORD dete ar ee Rb 2 18 1986 u a ee AA de 219719867199 ird etis vor A d un 2 203 199 a i Red edu Bde eio poi 2 21 Things whose time period is questionable 3 Accent Systems Corp 4 More PERQ History 4 1 Graphic Wonder eco oie we Pre ee 4 CONTENTS 4 1 1 Historical notes from Chris Lamb 4 2 ee 4 3 PERQ Fanatics Mailing Lists 44 OngmaluCode diri techy ug RR Des a PES 5 The Accent OS 5 1 The Accent 5 2 Co Equal Environments 5 3 A
76. RQ Microcode Kwok W Sheh wrote the following comment in the POS I O uCode source code In memory This code is dedicated to all of those who have lay the foundation for the perfection of the current microcode technology Brian Rosen had this to say about the above quote Most of the original microcode was written much earlier than Sheh s effort and was fairly amazing BR mailing list Dec 7 1992 In reply to Malcolm s questions about horiz vert uCode No vertical microcode does not follow from Writable Control Store In a horizontal microcoded machine the micro instruction set is wide and consists of several fields that directly control the hardware On a ver tical microcoded machine the instructions are typically narrower and have several levels of decoding to control the hardware BR mailing list Dec 7 1992 When asked what the microinstruction set is like It is a 48 bit horizontal format with register fields ALU ops special ops and branch fields BR mailing list Dec 7 1992 As I recall there were two fields that selected which register from a dual ported register file Two fields that selected what the ALU sources were one choice was the register file but there were others An ALU field that selected an ALU operation a Write bit that caused the dual port register file to be written two control fields that did one of several functions a branch control field and a branch
77. S WHOSE TIME PERIOD IS QUESTIONABLE 29 Perq T 2 production began ended number of units produced approx 5000 PERQ 24 bit CPU productiob began ended number of units produced Speech card for the PERQ introduced Multibus board for the PERQ introduced What were the dates for the releases of the different versions of the PERQs operating systems A picture of a PERQ aboard a U S Navy ship S S Carl Vinson ap peared in Newsweek magazine Work on floating point math chips began but not implemented other than making room for them on the I O board PERQ Systems had redesigned the entire PERQ CPU as that it would require only five chips Note that this new CPU would have been the func tional equivalent of the original microcoded CPU board Unfortunately PERQ was unable to obtain the required financing in the amount of ap proximately one million dollars which was necessary to put the redesigned CPU into production This new CPU would have increased reliability and speed as well as decreasing the size of the system A reduction in the size of the PERQs cabinet was to be made it would have resembled one of todays tower type cases for IBM type PC s The next project following the redesigned CPU was to have been a true 32 bit PERQ system New company ETI started by Jim Gay after he left PERQ Systems 1986 This company had something to do with artificial intelligence stuff and some of the PERQs Lisp stuff
78. The above paragraphs describe most of the CCS activities However 69 ambitions are wider Some members are also active in getting Bletchley Park where cryptanalysis was done in the last World War together with some of the remaining Huts saved for the nation It looks as though they will succeed The very large site and buildings will among other things house a Museum of Cryptography and possibly a Museum of Computing It will provide a permanent and spacious base for the CCS which will be able to work on old systems of its own as well as of the Science Museum It is expected that there will be adequate storage space so that early artefacts and documents can be properly stored and worked on In the meantime the CCS is grateful to accept objects particularly if the owner can hold on to them for a few more months Finally although this posting has been intended to expose the activities of the CCS and not as a recruiting drive if you feel you would like to join then send an application to the Secretary of the CCS 15 Northampton Road Bromham Bedfordshire MK43 8QB UK You will be put on a steam mail list on a database He would like to know Your name and address post code and phone number Your BCS membership number if any membership of BCS is NOT a requirement Your personal experience of which early computers as what designer builder maintainer user or whatever Younger people not experienced on early machines
79. The basic CPU circuitry would have been reduced to only five chips Eventually plans were made by PERQ systems to abandon the tradi tional proprietary PERQ CPU and to change over to an industry standard microprocessor like some other computer manufacturers such as Sun Mi crosystems used the Motorola MC68010 Chapter 57 PERQ User Groups 57 1 TRUST TRUST was the Three Rivers Users Society the company sponsored users group that distributed some PERQ public domain software which consisted of such utilities as those used to edit fonts and cursors There is a reference to this group in the POS D 6 manual According to Chris Lamb Apr 30 1992 In fact I believe the person at 3RCC who was in charge of the en tire software library including the user contributed stuff was Loretta Ferro She was a good friend of my stepdad and we saw each other on numerous occasions I don t know if TRUST had a newsletter or office or anything I think it was Three Rivers who acted as a clearng house for some of the stuff that users wanted to share but I could be totally off 57 2 Oxford PERQ User Group There was also a PERQ users group based at Oxford University that sup posedly published a PERQ newsletter The person to contact there about it is Charles Curran this info was from Nick Felisiak 253 254 CHAPTER 57 PERQ USER GROUPS Chapter 58 PERQ uses There are lot of people who actually believe that P
80. Those Who Were There Note about the PERQ s history from Brian Rosen as it appeared in the PERQ Fanatics mailing list on July 30 1993 might be able to shed a little light on chronology but only really remember the order of things rather than the actual dates It started at CMU where there was a very active engineering labo ratory headed by Bill Broadly that built hardware for CS research Several somewhat interesting projects came out of that including the first 16 bit A D and D A systems for speech and music research a writable control store for a PDP 11 model 40 and a cute vector calligraphic display that did 50 000 vectors at a 60Hz refresh rate Three Rivers Computer Corporation was started by Broadly Stan Kriz Jim Teter Paul Newbury and myself with a little help and en couragement from Raj Reddy Its first products were versions of the above projects We all worked full time for CMU and moonlighted at 3RCC In 1976 left to go to work at Xerox at the Palo Alto Research Center where worked on a successor to the Alto the first worksta 13 14 CHAPTER 2 HISTORY tion against which all others sprang called the Dolphin When the Dolphin was completed returned to 3RCC and started work on the That was 1978 At that time CMU was starting a project to change the way it provided computing to the CS people from timeshared mainframes to personal computers or workstations They put out a request
81. a C engine a Pascal engine or a LISP engine Individual time critical routines in software can also be microprogrammed to improve speed of execution 16 2 PERQ2 T2 LN3000 81 The data control structures are very straightforward with a few baroque quirks so that user microprogramming is easy NOTE use this as a direct quote from the brochure PERQ System Architecture TRC 12 The 4K writable control store is fully supported with assembler loader and debugger and is expected to be a popular option the processor has 20 bit internal data paths so that it can manipulate real addresses without resorting to double precision arithmetic The programmer does not see this it merely improves efficiency High speed microprogrammed 16 bit CPU high level language directed architecture integrated I O controllers Native instruction set is the P code byte sequences that a compiler generates for an ideal PASCAL or other structured language ma chine microcode supports a P code byte sequence that a compiler See above executes in excess of 1 million P codes per second 10 20 times faster than conventional interpreted P code instruction set is modifiable so that additional languages can be sup ported without compromising execution speed a writable control store option is available for uses to do their own language development or to optimize application programs the microcycle time is 170 ns 16 2 PERQ2 2 L
82. a Perq by talking voice to it a special keyboard was required for this An interface for the streamer tape drive could be placed in either the I 0 option slot or the CPU option slot However to use it in the CPU Option slot the key in the card edge connector would have to be removed for it to fit in that slot Refer to the drawing below Refer to drawing in red notebook amp recreate w Paint Keyboard 191 If using a Perql you get characters such as K on the screen no matter which keys you press it is very likely that the problem is due to a bad PROM in the keyboard Keyboard trivia the keyboard for my T2 survived an approximately 8 foot drop off of a loading platform onto the pavement below The only damage was a few very small dents in the plastic case and a few keys popped off whick were easily fitted back on I just consider this luck and would not advise anyone to attempt to duplicate this happening DDS The PERQ s diagnostic display DDS only contains valid information about the system status during the boot process After the system boot process has completed it is under the control of user programs and may have other uses defined by the authors of various prograns After a successful boot the displayed codes cannot be interpreted as they would during the boot process Some application programs are notorious for causing the DDS to change Beware of the DDS bug that can cause the display to be
83. accra oo nn nn 104 19 4 PERO Displays 3 2 2 e hey D Er ae 105 19 5 Color display es 106 19 6 Kriz Type Monitors 107 19 7 Random Memory 107 20 PERQ Documents Cataloged Thus Far 109 21 PERQ File System 119 22 PERQ Finance 121 23 Floating Point Unit 123 24 Glossary of PERQ CPU Terminology 125 25 PERQ GPIB 133 26 PERQ Graphics 135 26 1 PERQ Related Graphics Files 136 26 2 Strawberry Fairchild 136 26 3 Cursor Files 137 ZO LES PIC ara ae NURSE er He 137 27 PERQ 1 O RS 232 GPIB speech etc 139 27 1 PEBROL T O ity Gel NBS to ae EMG Ser 139 27 2 I O 780 Subsystem fe ee area Rn 139 21 32 EN 3000 ccu esae BA eh Gy REG Ke ES ed 140 27 4 EIO Board Ethernet 140 27 5 OIO Board Other ir A A 141 21 6 Perg R9 232 oof an AA EVE 142 21 01 PERQT isses er FEN ann 142 20 8 2 ENI 000 te a etie ne na A 142 25 T BERGO GPIB 2 d uu Base Gee E 142 BEROE dem PR tee dide 142 27 8 Speech and Sound 143 27 8 l ENZO 4 2 eh da Da 143 27 9 Temperature 143 CONTENTS 7 21 10Misc m4 AA LA 143 28 PERQ Keyboard 145 28 1 PEROT u uode ee re IDONEUM Wer CO ENS en 145 28 2 LN3000 4 ua Bor wenn ee ES 145 29 Link Board 147 30 PERQ LISP AI 149 31 PERQ 3410 seri
84. ack seek time is 6 milliseconds 18 7 PERQ T 2 W MULTIBUS 97 average access time is 30 milliseconds Serial data is transferred to and from the drive at 6 Mbits per second A further basic or slave drive may be daisy chained from the master drive in the same cabinet There is a delay in the establishment process to allow the fixed disk to come up to speed This is 20 seconds for a Micropolis 5 25 inch drive on a T2 18 7 PERQ T 2 W Multibus Note Multibus only works under Accent OS 3459 Multibus Storage Module disk controller formatter is a single Multi bus board which provides 24 bit DMA addressing 8 16 bit data 8 16 bit address multiple memory addressing modes buffered full sector direct and cached modes 1 1 interleave in direct and cache modes intelligent caching bad track and sector replacement bit rates of 20 Mbits sec control for up to 4 SMD drives automatic error correction overlapped seeks programmable sector and gap sizes interleave factor number of sectors track heads unit a full track of information can be transferred to memory in one disk revolution in direct mode special formatting allows multisector multitrack operations without missing a disk revolution 98 CHAPTER 18 PERQ MASS STORAGE DISK amp TAPE 18 8 SMD Disk Drive model 3456 Storage Module Disk Drive storage capacity unformatted 474 Mbytes number of disks 6 number of heads 20 average seek time 18 m
85. agnostic over all 21720 possible memory words This is a hack done to make the 1 MByte memory work The memory diagnostic should really be modified to really test all the memory that is present This appears to have been fixed by W J Hansen in the next version to find the size of the memory and only check that much In EioEther10 micro page 6 under Assumptions HACKs and other BAD Things in section 3 the following appears This feature is found in PERQ Kristmas and K2 Watch out for other machines In PERQ QCODE 5 269 Opcode PSW is the unimplemented process swap instruction Note this opcode calls Opcode PBLK is the unimplemented process block instruction Are these opcodes that were never implemented or are they remnamts of MPOS The undoing of MPOS from the PERQ Qcodes Dfs change log Undo changes which the Weekend WOnder Crew made for MPOS Note in change log from PERQ QCodes Dfs Note there are separate definitions of PERQ QCodes Dfs for POS and Solar This version is for POS only From codegen pas page 3 Note PERQ QCODES DFS is different for Accent and POS It is assumed that the Accent version is obtained when the host machine is Accent and the POS version when the host is POS With the exception of LSSN and TLATE s all qcodes generated by the compiler have the same value in both systems When we read the Accent PERQ QCODES DFS we define missing QCODES to be their
86. al picture on a computer s display screen The Alto had a specialized data path and it had to compute furiously for the raster op graphics algorythm that it used The Alto and later Xerox D machines used a peculiar type of microprogramming that no one has since copied It had multitasking multiprogramming which could run up to eight different microcode tasks at different priorities It was also the first machine to use an Ethernet interface BitBlt RasterOp also originated with the Alto 2 4 1972 1973 17 It was around this time that Digital Equipment Corp DEC had started producing minicomputers and time shared systems 2 4 1972 1973 Stan Kriz and Brian Rosen were undergrads in 1972 1973 attending Carnegie Mellon University CMU While at CMU they had access to this informa tion about Xerox and the Alto system 2 5 1973 Xerox s experimental workstation was completed all high performance graphic workstations are descendents of this machine The cost for one was 80 000 the production version of the Xerox Alto was the Xerox Star It was very proprietary and didn t do well BF Several hundred Altos were produced and some were given to universities such as Stanford MIT Rochester and CMU Note that a possible connection between the similarities of PERQ Pascal and Modula 2 may have something to do with the fact that Niklaus Wirth spent some time at PARC and that the PERQ was modeled after the Alto Something to check out
87. al Definition file elec doc PERQ 3B Architectural Model Processor Board Interface file psd doc PERQ 5 Serializer V1 0 file serial doc Pittsburgh s Smaller Companies Striving to Plug the Money Gap PERQ PLP CX Laser Printer Ammendment to User s Guide POS Aug 5 1985 Printing Software for the PLP 10 and PLP CX Laser Printers March 15 1985 files laser pro doc laser pro 3Prose Printing Software for the PLP 10 and PLP CX Laser Printers V1 0 May 15 1985 Release Notes for Accent S6 files lasrel pro doc lasrel pro 3Prose Print Three Desktop Publishing on the PC Comes to the Copy Shop they originally used PERQs 115 Program Development on a Graphical Workstation PERQs PNX man pages for treewalk curses no a cursor editor curses2 shades logo thumb splot and minit The PNX Window Manager Interface describes undocumented PNX system calls POS F 2 Test Plan by Donald A Scelza Nov 18 1981 3RCC 3 pages amp intro POS F 2 IO Test Plan by Jerry L Conner Feb 3 1983 3RCC 3 pg amp intro Python IOP diagnostic test descriptions Quick Guide to Disk Control by John R Rose 3RCC Feb 7 1983 Appears to be a preliminary document 16 pages Quick Guide to Disk Control Oct 22 1982 3RCC 7 pages RISC Workstation puts DOS on Module Mars Sequencer PROM Encoding PERQ 3 file seqcoding doc Shamos
88. al operations with memory access and conditional jumps 16 7 Extension Bits The CPU basically handles 16 bit words but four extension bits are em ployed within the engine for simplification of multi length operations and the generation of 20 bit memory addresses Four extension bits are employed within the microengine for simplifica tion of multi length operations and in addition to the 16 bit words handled by the CPU generate 20 bit memory addresses Most of the data paths in the microengine are 20 bits wide The data coming in and out of the processor e g I O and memory are 16 bits wide The extra four bits allow the microprogrammed processor to calculate real addresses in a one megaword address space The assumption is that virtual addresses are kept in a double word in memory but calculations on addresses can be single precision within the processor The programmer never sees the 20 bit paths 16 8 ALU The 17 function 20 bit arithmetic logic unit produces micro instruction re sults which are buffered for use as e Memory address and data in e Input output bus address and data e Source operand register input Outputs Result are fed back to the XY registers as well as being fed to the memory data output and memory address registers If the hold bit is set the contents of R are written into the register specified in the X field of the microinstruction word When reset no XY registers are modified 16 9 A AND B MU
89. al time clock setting kit This kit consists of e a physical tool Dil clip 86013116 Possibly this is nothing more than two wires terminating in clips and connected to a switch Eg e a floppy disk 80043716 a special boot floppy Refer to T2 service guide for more info on this 71 72 CHAPTER 13 REAL TIME CLOCK Chapter 14 PERQ and Its Competition PERQ Systems entered the untapped workstation market in 1980 with the PERQ Newer vendors such as Apollo and Sun Microsystems with low cost work stations amd networking capabilities entered the market and proved to be formidable competitors Sun used off the shelf hardware components in order to achieve low prices get more proof of this Dataquest in May of 1984 believed that the PERQ had a solid work station product in the LN3000 and strong networking capabilities in LINQ The introduction of these products signified a strong leap forward for PERQ which thrusted the company full force into the workstation market with vendors such as Sun Microsystems and Apollo note author of Dataquest article Gail Levy In a message I wrote to Chris Lamb BTW did you see the report on CNN about workstations It was one of those 3 minute technology updates or whatever they call them First off they defined workstation A souped up PC Next they proceeded to make an apparently carefully researched statement which said that Sun was the first workstation I wonder how much Su
90. amCh Chr 303 A quote from iors pas change log of March 3 1983 by Chuck Beckett Exported private variables This will allow demos and other time dependent stuff to access IORS directly Caveat hacker Importing IORS is really a dumb thing to do unless you have absolutely no other choice From FileTypes pas This module exports Types put into the FileType field of File FIBs The types are stored as integers The file types are UnknownFile 0 SegFile PasFile DirFile ExDirFile FontFile 5 RunFile 6 TextFile 7 for non Pascal text files CursorFile BinaryFile 9 BinFile 10 for microcode output MicroFile 11 ComFile 12 RelFile 13 IncludeFile 14 included in a Pascal file SBootFile 15 system part of a boot file MBootFile 16 microcode part of a boot file SwapFile 17 used for swapping by compiler or editor length not set BadFile 18 created by scavenger il l No 8 for cursor bin files 287 ForFile 19 FORTRAN source file DatFile 20 FORTRAN unformatted data file PsgFile 21 FORTRAN pre seg file ExtFile 22 FORTRAN external definition file LibFile 23 FORTRAN library file TempFile 24 file created by Temper From id Others pas page 12 Supported cursor is 56 x 64 with scan line length of 4 From io _private pas page 6 SMD stands for Store Module Technology From io _tester pas page 54 Message returned if user enter
91. ame basic workstation hardware Uses PERQ LISP the same as Spice LISP a low cost high performance Lisp workstation delivers Lisp performance comparable to a VAX 11 780 at a quarter of the price PERQ Lisp is a superset of Common Lisp featuring tagged architecture data items are tagged with a data type field lexically scoped variables in both the interpreter and compiler keyword optional parameters to functions multiple return values fpr example an integer division function can return both an an integer quotient and a remainder user controllable error handling and dynamic non local exits powerful macro facilities stream based 1 O facilities formatting and pretty printing facilities a rich set of numerical data types e g IEEE floating point ratio nal numbers and arbitrary precision integers with generic numerical primitives 149 150 CHAPTER 30 PERQ LISP AI e string array and vector data types with sequence operations e bit and field manipulation e hash table facilities e user defined data types records or structures e graphics primitives e access to window manager e interprocess communication facilities e alien data structure handling facilities for dealing with message data from other languages such as Pascal C or FORT RAN Integrted into the PERQ Lisp environ ment is a screen oriented EMACS like editor the Hemlock editor which provides facilities for editing eval uating and
92. an Monitor V1 0 theory of operation and specs for custom components file monitr doc MegaScan Receives 3 3 Million in Venture Infusion Pgh Business Times 1987 misc video pattern programs documentation PERQ 3 file vid misc doc Monitors Give X Ray Film Challenge MegaScan MPOS Users Guide by Bob Amber 1982 3RCC document possibly incomplete 10 pages MPOS Users Guide Incomplete March 31 1982 MProm Program PROMs from a Bin File Multibus User Guide file multi mss Scribe NewPart documentation March 85 Pascal Version 12 8f Release Notes Feb 1 1985 file ps128f pro Pascal Version 12 8g Release Notes April 10 1985 file ps128g pro Pepper help file file edhelp ehelp 114 CHAPTER 20 PERQ DOCUMENTS CATALOGED THUS FAR PERQ and Advanced Raster Graphics Workstations PERQ Color Display Concept Document by Robert P Colwell J Stanley Kriz and David Stonet July 2 1982 revision 2 0 13 pages PERQ PERQ 3 focus transformer data PERQ Reports Revenues Double PERQ Systems Corp info from Pgh High Technology Council Mem bership Directory PERQ TCP IP file tcp mss The PERQ Workstation and the Distributed Computing Environment R A L PERQ 7 80 Messages by Bill Glass and Donald A Scelza Aug 14 1981 8 pages intro and table of contents PERQ 3 8 Megabyte memory file time text PERQ 3 SIB Electric
93. anslate data representations between languages With a Matchmaker generated interface clients access server functions by making simple procedure calls The Matchmaker generated code handles the entire message send and reply sequence This is network transparent so that a client on one machine can effec tively call a procedure on another machine across the net 5 5 Microprogramming Accent makes use of microprogramming for a number of low level system operations The machine contains a 16K 48 bit word block of Writable Control Store WCS Of this a 4K block is reserved for user microprograms Because microprogramming is critical to PERQs own efficient use of the machine much care has been taken to provide microprogramming develop ment tools which are easy to use Microprogram development is supported by a microcode assembler and placer Accent supports execution of user microprograms by allowing dynamic microcode loading execution including calls to microcode from any of the languages supported under Accent In compute bound applications such as font outline to raster conversion picture compression raster scale and rotate etc microcoded subroutines 46 CHAPTER 5 THE ACCENT OS can increase speeds by factors greated than 10 1 Multiple instruction sets corresponding to the supported languages co reside in Writable Control Store Each language s instruction set is opti mized for that language Accent switches instructi
94. apability to have more than one context established at a time This allows rapid switch ing from editor to compiler to debugger for instance without normal start up delays e Multiple processes permit background I O spooling network accesses by other systems etc without disturbing the user e The operating system also supports the PERQs virtual memory system which manages very large programs with ease e Provides a multiprocessing environment for PERQs e Permits concurrent execution of up to 32 processes e To run multiple processes multiple shells are created with the New Shell command e Each shell has its own window but each process can have multiple windows e Windows may overlap one another e The puck mouse is used to control window size and placement e A row of boxes at the top of the screen is used to indicate the status of each process 167 168 CHAPTER 35 MPOS PERQ MULTIPLE PROCESS OS Does not support Ethernet Statistics command not implemented Bye command does not support the OFF switch Supports inter process communication which uses a basic message sys tem consisting of mailboxes and message operations that send mes sages to and receive messages from the mailboxes Utilities not converted to MPOS as of March 31 1982 were FixPart MakeBoot Partition and Scavenger 35 1 MPOS File system e distributed file system which supports multiple tree structured directories file v
95. ards These are the ones with a small PC board attached to the front of the board this small PC board contains a few chips a small trimmer pot and a coil Refer to the drawing below The trimmer pot is used to adjust the stability of the video display Ethernet 1 0 Boards Some board labels may be misleading To determine if a IO board is an EIO board look at the top left hand corner of the board for the ENET proms 190 CHAPTER 39 PERQ KEEPER S GUIDE PERQ1 systems use a seperate Ethernet board not an board In order to use the Accent OS on a PERQ an Ethernet 1 0 board or an Ethernet board must be present Note that when runing Accent a little icon known the Ethernet 1 0 Eye may be present at the top of the display insert Paint drawing of this here All EIO and Non EIO Boards On allmost all I O boards EIO and non EIO there are five chips missing These chips were to be used for floating point math circuitry employing an Intel 8087 math co processor Misc Q Are any of the boards for the Perqi and Perq2 interchangeable A Yes to a point Refer to the previous question Note the Perqi s used seperate Ethernet boards and not EIO combo boards like some T 2s used The ethernet I D boards were placed in the 1 0 option slot of the Perqis Some of the other uses for the Optional 1 0 slot in the Perq s card cage are as follows A speech card which would allow a user to issue commands to
96. arked as Unmovable This will allow the memory manager to place it into a reasonable part of memory before it is tied down From arith pas The compiler did not originally support type long and used an interim double precision arithmetic package that originated at CMU in 1980 From Code pas 280CHAPTER 62 INTERESTING NOTES FROM POS G 2 SOURCE CODE Also added other fields to the zero block of the seg files to provide access to information needed by fortran From ComplexFunctions pas March 31 1982 DISCLAIMER Since Math identities are utilized to evaluate these functions accuracy and execution speed may be very poor Only the most cursory testing of these functions has been performed No guarantees are made as to the accuracy or correctness of the functions Validation of the functions must be done but at some later date From Configuration pas Landscape portrait logic added on Feb 2 1983 VT 100 compatible keyboard introduced with the PERQ K1 Kristmas model in Januart 1983 An Intel 8087 was to have been used as the floating point co processor CIO Current IO board EIO Ethernet IO board introduced with the PERQ K1 Kristmas model in January of 1983 From Memory pas change log With help from John Strait Brad Myers fixed a underline serious bug in InitMemory where it changes the value of a memory location while trying to decide what the size of memory is From
97. as Ras terOp which performs logical operations on memory This is especially useful for rapid manipulations of the display image The RasterOp Q Code can be invoked by the PERQ Pascal compiler The RasterOp hardware performs shift mask and merge operations on 64 bits at a time which are pipelined into the hardware The speed is limited by the memory cycle time of 680ns for 64 bits 16 14 MICRO STATE REGISTER 87 16 14 Micro state register The micro state register allows the transfer of CPU status and extension bit s value to the memory 16 15 Shift Matrix Is part of the special hardware provided for the RasterOp operator 16 16 Micro Instruction Register Buffers 48 bit addressed microinstructions 16 17 Micro State Register Allows the transfer of CPU status and extension bits value to the memory 16 18 Byte Position Counter BPC Also known as the byte program counter Is a 4 bit BPC according to some documentation and a 3 bit BPC ac cording to other documentation Sequentially addresses eight Q or C code bytes from memory and loads them into the operation registers The most significant bit of the BPC indicates that the OP register needs refilling and it imployed by the microcode as a jump condition Addresses the read port of the OP file Can be read as the Micro State Register UState via AMux 88 CHAPTER 16 THE PERQ CPU Chapter 17 Design Chris Lamb was given by Dave Callen some of the original ha
98. asional retries at sending data 27 7 PERQ GPIB 27 7 1 PERQ1 PERQ provides a full IEEE 488 1975 standard implementation of the General Purpose Instrumentation Bus the GPIB provides a simple compatible way of interfacing a wide range of medium speed peripherals as well as laboratory facilities production test equipment and instrumentation 27 8 SPEECH AND SOUND 143 27 8 Speech and Sound 27 8 1 LN3000 e Speech and sound generation hardware e Can be used for a speech synthesizer to go along with voice input circuitry in order to provide a user interface less conventional than a screen and keyboard 27 9 Temperature Sensing The Z80 circuitry performs some sort of voltage temperature checking Code in POS pascal library IO modules reports voltage and tempera ture settings 27 10 Misc Noted in POS F 2 Test Plan I O related Bugs restrictions etc en countered during testing will be reported to Chelmsford ICL England software engineering 144 CHAPTER 27 PERQ I O RS 232 GPIB SPEECH ETC Chapter 28 PERQ Keyboard 28 1 PERQI e 60 keys e Most likely component to fail is the PROM 28 2 LN3000 e Detached solid state keyboard stretches up to 8 from display er from the back of the display e 84 keys including numeric keypad and for user definable function keys e ASCII character code 145 146 CHAPTER 28 PERQ KEYBOARD Chapter 29 Link Board The link board allows the direc
99. at shouldn t rule out important younger things which might need rescuing So early IBM 360s and ICL 1900s count Commodore Pets count yes there are dozens about PERQs count just I saw two in the Science Museum archive store about a couple of weeks ago Visicalc counts pun not intended I think it will be some time before 486 PC clones count BESM counts we are very interested in Soviet cold war vintage machinery There are roughly 300 members of whom about 10 are actively involved in some way Membership is open to anyone interested in computer conservation and the history of computing and is currently free Members give their time voluntarilly There are half a dozen Corporate Members including ICL Unisys Digital Bull HN Information Systems and Vaughan Systems who donate a large amount of money annually to pay for running the CCS In order to meet the objectives the CCS does the following things WORKING PARTIES There are a number of working parties each led by a chairman and 67 containing typically a dozen members who are prepared to give some time and effort typically a half day every six weeks Working parties are formed as required and the current ones are _Elliott 401 WP_ Very active currently conserving and restoring to working order this very important unique valve machine built in 1952 and in the care of the Museum _Pegasus WP_ Not quite so active but has maintained in working order the also very imp
100. ber that you have selected is not correct the program will present you with numbers on a cylindar boundary that is close to what you selected and will ask you which number you wich to select You are now ready to make the partion or partitions that you created bootable and can load files onto them Refer to MakeBoot and BindBoot for making a partition bootable 198 CHAPTER 39 PERQ KEEPER S GUIDE Running a Non destructive Reformat A reformat reads information off the disk and writes the data back Use this every six months or so more often if you keep your monitor on top of the PERQ cabinet This will prevent data on your hard disk from deteriorationg It might not be necessary to run this but doing So is a good precaution against disaster Using FixPart I ve never used this experimental program Please respond if you have used this and understand exactly what it does etc and why it is needed Using BindBoot Under POS for Accent The BindBoot program under POS may be used to make an Accent partition bootable that is accessible by POS The following explains what you would enter to create a bootable Accent partition using the b boot Existing boot file Accent Boot Hard disk selected Which character to boot from b System b boot is unused Interpreter b boot is unused System or Interpreter S press return System b boot disk address nn Existing boot file Accent T2 MBoot see table below for othe
101. bound background tasks must not interfere with cursor tracking or placement routines Memory and disk space are managed by a demand paging feature in the kernel this paging feature is responsible for handling references to virtual addresses which are not currently resident in physical memory This job is done completely by passing messages between the kernel the pager and other server processes The Accent message system and virtual memory systems interact so that it is possible to send a very large megabytes message between two local or remote processes Provides facilities which offer unique microcode implemented language support yielding multiple virtual machine environments Under Accent each process utilizes an instruction set which is optimized for the language in which the process is written Accent changes instruction sets dynamically depending upon the language of the process which is executing The file system incorporated into the Accent kernel features a tree structured directory Reliability has been enhanced through the use of special hardware what special hardware The file system is transpar ent across the network so access to remote files is the same as access to local files Access control lists protect file access for system security Files are mapped into the process virtual address space and are treated as virtual memory 44 CHAPTER 5 THE ACCENT OS 5 2 Co Equal Environments One of the most unique features o
102. bout this QCode Sigh else if doPrtDis then writeln Outfile Undefined QCode QC The program DiskTest 1983 contains no change log and no names of those who wrote adn modified it THis was included with POS G 2 sources but the only disk supported by this version of DiskTest was the Micropolis 8 drive strange since is supposedly the set of floppies used to install POS G 2 on my PERQ 1 Note that later versions of DiskTest are supposed to suport the Shugart 14 drives as well as the newer 5 1 4 drives In order to run diagnostics etc on the Shugart 14 drives uner POS G 2 the program dtst micro had to be run from ODTPrq The routine in DTST micro that reads a scctor was named ItsABoy Had someone s wife just had a baby when this was being written Note DTST was written by Brian Rosen In Etherhelp pas one of the commands was Intel which was a mode for use with the Intel Development System What was the Intel Development System 274CHAPTER 62 INTERESTING NOTES FROM POS G 2 SOURCE CODE ec In high micro the placer bug is mentioned if True required by placer bug What was the placer bug What was the KERNAL program Was it something similar to ODTPrq From comments in mem micro test by typing to ODTPRQ KERNAL An error message form pdm pas Fatal Error while attempting to report error Comment in
103. built in Is this all OIO boards If not what changes would need to be made to add this to an OIO board e Why would they design a system with a clock calendar that the users could not set without special hardware and software e Why was no software written that would allow POS programs to run as processes under Accent 171 172 CHAPTER 36 PERQ MYSTERIES TO BE SOLVED Chapter 37 Various names of people associated with PERQs Note from Chris Lamb My stepdad worked for 3RCC back in the 80 82 timeframe The first real computer I ever used and learned on was a PERQ tutored by him twice a week at RIDC Three Rivers Advanced Development Group s location I must be the youngest 23 and longest running PERQ fanatic on the planet 10 years I have two PERQ 1s and a t2 that is shipping from Pgh tomorrow I have TONS of floppies literature manuals and schematics I ve got an official PERQ t shirt on my wall at home those are almost as rare as color displays CL in message to WvH on May 27 1991 37 1 Individuals e Bob Amber wrote MPOS Users Guide 1982 at 3RCC e Miles Barrel wrote a lot of the later microcode e Chuck Beckett 3RCC wrote project description for TCPOS IP TCP for POS titled IP TCP for POS Descriptopn on April 5 1982 e Steve Clark an engineer at PERQ migrated to either MegaScan or Mars check notes Wrote the calculator program calc e K Coc
104. bviates the necessity for translating sections of code from one language to another e The extension of facilities which manage display windowing to a multi process operating system such as UNIX presents a number of problems such as 207 208 CHAPTER 41 PNX PERQ UNIX t would be desirable for each UNIX process to be able to create and modify one or more windows but it may also be desirable for a number of processes to display information in the same window in cooperative way t would be desirable to share I O devices between windows be longing to different processes It would be desirable for hidden windows to signal essential information to the user n order to avoid conflicts between the requirements of different processes a special window manager process may be necessary to supervise the creation and movement of windows A graphics application initially developed for POS the Graphics Ker nel System GKS was being developed by a collaboration between ICL and SERC which was at version 7 2 as of April 1983 At this time Rutherford Appleton Laboratory was installing an earlier ver sion of GKS V 6 2 under UNIX which was to be ported to the PERQ as soon as full UNIX facilities were available It was not possible for the CCode as it was written to coexist with QCode I don t think there was enough microcode space and they both assumed they had 10096 control over the machine Brian Rose
105. ccent Window Manager Sapphire gA Matchmaker lou Some user RUE edo 5 5 Microprogramming es 5 6 Other Info x ioo Rep oe Rex uS E Ree eR Tora 5 7 Accent and Printing Publishing 43 REX oS e 5 8 Porting POS Code to Accent 5 9 Accent SB v euadere m Gok e pz 5 10 Naming of Accent 6 The Action List 7 Adverts and Etc TA 5 Tanana bee d ev OR wed 7 1 1 PERQ Systems and cooperative agreements 8 Advent Systems 9 Autologic Development 10 PERQ Circuit Boards 11 PERQ Bus System 11 1 Memory Data In MDI 11 2 Memory Data Out gin aah ser ansehe 12 Computer Conservation Society 13 Real Time Clock 13 1 Setting up the real time clock 14 PERQ and Its Competition 15 The alt sys perq Control Message 49 53 53 55 57 59 61 63 63 63 64 65 71 71 73 75 CONTENTS 16 The PERQ CPU 16 1 PERO Tios ef at toe edem ee 16 2 PERQ2 2 2 8000 16 3 Differences between the PERQ1 and the PERQIA CPU 16 4 Writable Control 16 5 Micro Sequencer 16 6 Micro instructions 16 7 Extension Bits 16 8 ALU oa a ed ee ise x ace 16 9 and B multiplexors 16 10XY
106. ce is at fault Chris Lamb PERQ Fanatics mailing list July 29 1994 Andreas you re right the original Perqs were poorly designed and didn t adhere to even nominal worst case timing conventions But in the pot calling thekettle black department the original Sun workstations weren t much better The difference seems to have been that Sun had a business plan and gradually improved their hardware Perq uh well didn t Bob Colwell July 30 1994 264 CHAPTER 61 PERQ HATERS 61 2 Miscellaneous Mutterings Michael Lawrie on July 29 1993 wrote Jamie dear boy it s rude to forcibly subscribe Sun people to a mailing list about Peras now be a good chappie and remove him or I ll put you on a Prime mailing list And remove that Allistair chappie too Mutter mutter Would it be a silly question to ask why I am on here The most I ever did with my perq was turn it on the sight of that disk between my legs looking like a log saw frightened me to death and it s been in the garage ever sinde I know it s rude to use your list like this but hell who cares I don t suppose anyone out there has an Apple Lisa still working that I can nick some startup disks from Michael 61 3 New Mailing List Re Launched When the new PERQ Fanatics mailing list was re launched after the cal cellation of the first new mailing list due to the automagic subscriptions to it of many people who weren t too fond of the PERQs
107. cess communication concurrent active windows multiple instruction sets multiple processes with a flexible process scheduling facility Accent provides a transparent remote file and server prcess access for example a LISP program on one machine may invoke a process on a second machine access data on a third and and send screen output to a fourth all managed by the operating system without the program having to know where these resouces are or even understand how they are accessed Simultaneously supports co equal environments which include the na tive Accent environment LISP and Qnix a UNIX System V environment licensed from A T amp T The fact that these environments are co equal means that a program in LISP for instance has access to all the facilities of either native Accent or Qnix With LINQ provides multiprocessing capabilities a distributed file sys tem and transparent access to network graphics computation and data re sources 41 Original PR release about Accent PERQ Systems Announces New Vir tual Memory Operating System Article bearing Pittsburgh phone num bers appears to originate in Anaheim Calif on May 15 1984 Developed jointly with the Computer Science Department of Carnegie Mellon University over the last five years five years back from 1984 1980 19847 Provides high performance graphics and transparent access to network resources Features multiple co equal instruction set architectures
108. compiling Lisp expressions and saves results in either the Lisp environment or a file It is written entirely in PERQ Lisp and is readily extensible extensive on line help and documentation powerful debugging facilities The PERQ s architecture can be microcoded for optimum Lisp perfor mance A press release for the PERQ AI workstation appeared at the same time as one for the Accent operating system May 15 1984 This press release also orginated from Anaheim CA Running Common Lisp PERQ AI has the same performance as the VAX 11 780 at one fifth the price other sources mention one fourth the price did the cost of a VAX 111 780 increase or did the price of a PERQ decrease Says Coleman We chose to implement Common Lisp because it is the de facto standard used by a significant group of companies and institutions that include Carnegie Mellon University Massachussetts Institute of Tech nology and Lawrence Livermore Laboratories PERQ Lisp incorporates many features which make it a valuable tool for symbolic processing PERQ AI was developed as a response to the market need for a versatile low cost artificial intelligence workstation says Coleman is he referring to hardware or software Was the T2 new in 1984 He added that PERQ Systems Corp is an experienced high volume OEM workstation supplier 151 PERQ AI incorporates a powerful screen oriented editor into the PERQ Lisp environment that is modelled after the well k
109. could still use their own system whereas if they were using a multiuser system none of the users would be able to use the system if the system crashed Another use planned for the PERQs was the role of intelligent terminals attached to larger multi user systems which 249 250 CHAPTER 56 TECHNICAL MISCELLANY could be used to take some of the processing load off the main system as well as providing users with high resolution graphics displays On the other end of the computing spectrum were small microprocessor based personal computer systems which were affordable enough to be purchased for individual use These conventional personal computer systems do not have the resources necessary to compete with the larger timeshared systems The essence behind the concept of the PERQ was to provide users with the best of both worlds by providing a user with a very responsive and powerful computing environment that has high quality graphics large local storage capacity and the ability to connect with other systems through a local area network Although some people s recollections of the PERQs are of slow noisy and unreliable machines whose primary benefit was the ability to take the chill off of a cold room these were most often the opinions of people who had never used the newer PERQ T 2 systems The newer systems were much more responsive primarily due to quicker hard disks The speed of the CPU itself never was what one could call slow at the time
110. d 62 Interesting Notes from POS G 2 Source Code CONTENTS 247 249 253 293 PEE 253 255 257 259 261 Eee e Kat 262 jour 264 264 267 Chapter 1 Preface and Dedication This document needs to be updated to reflect the information provided for PERQ Fanatics from Dr A R Duell Tony has been an amazing source of ingenious information about maintaining repairing preserving and un derstanding the PERQ workstations and other computers and I can t call this document anywhere close to being somewhat complete without includ ing some of that information which planned to add while trying to complete this incomplete document over a decade ago There s also some other information about the PERQs that I d like to eventually include which may be of interest or which may be yawn inducing you decide Hope fully get round to completing another version of this with all of the aforementioned information added to it This document is dedicated to Tony Duell and the creators of the PERQs to whom I say Thanks for your work and ingenious hacking 11 12 CHAPTER 1 PREFACE AND DEDICATION Chapter 2 History Note Unless otherwise noted with a specific month or year all items below fit somewhere within either the year or decade specified but possibly not in the exact order in which they are mentioned within that generalized time period 2 1 PERQ History as Told by
111. d are referenced by segment numbers The segments are either code segments or data segments Code sements Segments of code for execution by the processor have a maximum size of 64 KBytes they are accesible on a read only basis Data segments Segments of data have a maximum size of 128 KBytes they can be written to or read from Process A number of code and data segments are grouped together to form a process program A minimum of two segments is required a code segment and a data segment defined as the process stack segment Stack segment The stack segment MStack contains internal segment numbers generated by the compiler which link the segments within a pro cess The stack segment also contains a global data block GDB which allows access to data not included in the process Process in memory To run a process it is loaded into memory The segments loaded are referenced by segment address tables SAT in memory starting at address 0 During loading internal segment numbers SSN in the segment address tables and by further entries in the stack segment Much of the arithmetic of a Q Code process is performed on operands addressed by means of the GDB and transferred to the CPU expression stack EStack 42 2 POS File Types SEG A file containing Q Code generated by the PASCAL compiler RUN A file containing Q Code and the framework to allow its execution that is code and data segments linked to form a process 42 3
112. d diagnostics take a long time to run This is especially true of memory diagnostics The way to tell what it is doing is to look at the DDS Since it tells you what failed as it does it it tells you what passed so by looking at the DDS list you can figure out what it is doing next potential failure It does spend a while on memory diagnostics don t recall all of this but as remember there are two sets of diagnostics one is a check of the micromachine and enough 18 3 FLOPPY SHUGART SA851 OR SA858 93 of the memory to load the boot microcode The boot microcode loads a more extensive diagnostic then loads memory with an im age containing the operating system and the real microcode The microcode is loaded into the WCS and the OS is started distantly recall some problem with disk reading taking a long time on the 1A but thought we fixed that one Memory tests take the longest single time slice as recall Brian Rosen mailing list Jan 27 1993 18 3 Floppy Shugart SA851 or SA858 Also optionally available is a 1 megabyte double sided double density IBM compatible floppy disk drive Note does the above refer to the 8 drive with a format which may be compatible with larger IBM minis mainframes such as the RT 11 format used by the PERQs floppy program or do they mean an optional 5 1 4 floppy drive which is compatible with IBM PCs Also note that RT 11 is from DEC not IBM Why not say DEC compatib
113. e defined by PERQ software to the Z80 CPU which loads the SIO and timer registers Operation up to 9600 baud is supported The protocols for the speech tablet and keyboard channels are fixed as e Speech output synchronous 8 bit characters sync character 55 con tinuous syncbytes and transmitted when there is no data 32 KHz clock e Standard tablet synchronous about 90 messages a second consisting of a syncbyte of 7E and 4 data bytes 32 KHz clock e Keyboard input asynchronous eight data bits framed by a single start and stop bit for each key pressed 30 KHz clock 233 234 CHAPTER 50 SERIAL INPUT OUTPUT 50 1 PERQ RS 232 50 1 1 PERQI full duplex high speed serial data port supports asynchronous bisynchronous and SDLC HDLC ADCCP pro tocols at up to 56K bits per second all line and protocol parameters are programmable modem control is standard PERQ includes a single full bit stream at up to 9600 baud Note this ad mentions nothing about the 56K bits per second like the other did Chapter 51 PERQ Software The user writes programs in high level languages and his statements are compiled to generate an intermediate level code This intermediate level code is not executed directoy but makes entries to sequences of micro instructions which the central processor executes The micro instructions are single byte instructions followed by up to 4 bytes of parameters The POS system s intermediate level in
114. e is all theirs From page 1 or pascal pas Scott Brown s Nov 18 1982 entry for V9 7 This represents a point of divergence of the Pascal compiler I am taking the current sources of the compiler modifying some of the constants for conditional compilation in order to produce a compiler which is to run under POS only and generate code which is to run under POS only Page 9 of pascal pas indicates that 3RCC had considered an Accent to POS cross compiler but thought that there was little chance that it would be implemented However there appears to be cross compiling from POS to Accent Apparently there was a kluDge in the code for pasO pas on page 17 according to the following comment we can t really handle wrap around so chocolate covered fudge From the QDis pas change log John Brodie made a fix to disassemble Solar codes and modified QDis to execute under Solar on Oct 25 1982 and Nov 17 1982 respectively Again a mention of the new 05 this was from the QDis pas change log for V1 5 of April 1 1981 Conversions to run under the new 0 S From QDis pas comment page 28 writeln TitleLine someday maybe we 1l have a solar window title 273 From QDisByteProcessors pas page 3 var busyBee integer counter used to slow down updates to ShowProgress necessary to prevent bee from looking too hyperactive From QDisByteProcessors pas procedure NextQCode page 31 we don t know a
115. e the Perq is old enough suspect it may have trouble talking to 802 3 compliant systems CL mailing list Nov 24 1992 38 9 FTP to Sun Shoot there were some disks I THREW AWAY that John S and someone else did for Intran to do FTP to the Sun It was buggy but under ideal conditions you could get the files from the Sun to the Perq and vice versa CL Chapter 39 PERQ Keeper s Guide DKK KK K KK KK ok ok ok K FK OK K FK K ok ok ok ok ok ok OK OK OK FK dd OK OK OK K THE PERQ KEEPER S GUIDE to remaining sane Miscellaneous notes regarding the Repair operation etc The information contained within this guide for the most part is necessary knowlege for using and maintaining a PERQ However most of it is not mentioned in the manuals supplied with the PERQs and was inside information This first version of the guide is in ASCII text form Future versions will be in the format of mss files for the Mint document processing software and will be distributed in either that form or as printed documentation Copies will be made freely available to members of the PERQ Preservation Society as long as I am financially able to do so Thanks to in alphabetical order the following for the information that they ve provided which has been included in this users guide Dave Callen formerly of PERQ Systems and Accent Systens Had I
116. e with all 4 devices running simultaneously For lower speed devices an 8 bit microprocessor is included in the system to provide a low cost method of interfacing simple peripherals Incorporat ing a standard microprocessor permits the use of off the shelf LSI compo nents to reduce the cost and complexity of for example the RS 232 channel and the IEEE 488 bus interface The high speed controllers and the microprocessor communicate with the CPU via a 16 bit IO bus 27 2 I O 780 Subsystem The system consists of a 4 MHz Z80 single chip microprocessor intercon nected with supporting circuits by an address bus and a data bus The PERQ CPU controls peripheral operations by transferring com mands and or data to the Z80 subsystem through either the DMA con troller channel or the I O data bus The supporting circuits provide the following features e The I O bus interface two 16 byte registers for Z80 PERQ CPU communications Interrupt lines and status bits provide hand shaking 139 140 CHAPTER 27 PERQ I O RS 232 GPIB SPEECH ETC for transfers through the I O data bus e A 32 byte buffer for transfer to and from the PERQ memory Transfers are handled by the DMA controller e l he Z80 memory consisting of 4 K Bytes of boot PROM and 16 KBytes of dynamic RAM e The Z80 direct memory access chip 8237 2 allowing the Z80 periph eral controllers to access Z80 memory through the Z80 bus This circuit also refreshes the dyna
117. eal Quick As recently as 1990 there was a listing for Three Rivers Computer in the Thomas Register check this out again for better details Although a phone number was listed it was no longer a working number PERQ systems has evolved in its 10 year history from the pioneer de veloper of high performance graphics workstations to the manufacturer and 4 1 GRAPHIC WONDER 35 marketer of the world s most advanced high erformancs graphics network systems most likely written in 1984 PERQ Systems Corp was founded in 1974 as Three Rivers Computer Corporation by a group of engineers from Carnegie Mellon University Their first efforts concentrated on custom designed graphics systems In 1980 the company pioneered the introduction of the industry s first high performancs graphics workstation Since that time in conjunction with Carnegie Mellon University PERQ Systems has been developing Accent a network wide virtual memory operating system and the LINQ open systems local area network In the past year 1983 1984 PERQ Systems has e Raised approximately 10 million in a private placement e Consolidated operations in a new 70 000 sq ft manufacturing and office facility Liberty Avenue in Pittsburgh e Introduced the PERQ 2 e Changed name from Three Rivers Computer Corp to more closely associate itself with its popular line of products e Installed a new top management team e Averaged a one hundred percent growth in sal
118. ense or duplicate other instructions An interesting game we often played was to figure out how many ways to program a microinstruction that was effectively a NOP A varient is to figure out a NOP that does the most amount of work for nothing like A multiplied by B without saving the result is better than A plus B without saving the result because it takes more work to multiply than add With a vertical microarchitecture you encode the instruction fields tightly so that it takes fewer bits to represent the possible opera tions that you can do sort of like what a regular instruction set for a classic machine language would do The trade off is size of the mi croword vs hardware complexity and speed H machines tend to be fast but need lots of microcode bits V machines tend to be slower but have more instructions for a given number of microcode storage bits Typical H style microwords are 32 128 bits wide Typical V style is 16 or 24 bits Typically you can get more done with an H style word For example in a single Perq microinstruction you can fetch two words from a register file ALU them execute a special function like do an IO operation branch to a microsubroutine while pushing the current PC on a stack all in one instruction Typically a V style machine could only get one of those things done in one instruction As a result H style tends to be fewer microinstructions per opcode As a point of reference the majority of micr
119. er I ve ever seen CL Nov 6 1992 Named after the PERQ graphics display guru Stan Kriz 108 CHAPTER 19 PERQ DISPLAY Chapter 20 PERQ Documents Cataloged Thus Far 1K Line Portrait Monitor Yoke Mods to Discom 127320 1 PERQ 3 file 1kyokemods IK Monitor Theory of Operation April 11 1983 PERQ 2 or 3 20 Fascinating Facts You Didn t Know About ICL mentions PERQ 256K Memory Function Mars memory board scheme PERQ 3 file memtxt Accent A Communication Oriented Network Operating System Ker nel The Accent LISP Users Guide The Red Pages Aug 1 1984 LISP M2 Accent Version 6 Amendment No 1 April 29 1985 Release Notes files s6amd1 pro 3Prose Accent Version S6 Amendment No 2 May 2 1985 Release Notes files s6amd2 pro doc s6amd2 pro 3Prose Accent Version 6 Amendment No 3 June 14 1985 Release Notes files s6amd3 pro doc s6amd3 pro 3Prose Accent Version S6 Amendment No 4 August 2 1985 Release Notes 109 110 CHAPTER 20 PERQ DOCUMENTS CATALOGED THUS FAR files relusr pro doc relusr pro 3Prose Accent Version S6 Amendment No 4 August 2 1985 Changes to the System Administration Manual files relsys pro doc relsys pro Accent Version S6 Amendment No 4 August 2 1985 Changes to the Programming Manual files relprg pro doc relprg pro Accent Version S6 Amendme
120. erformance Perg T2 The real Perq 2 with the 16K CPU up to 2 MB RAM the EIO board with Ethernet built in wasn t this available with the original PERQ 2 and also an option on the T2 5 25 disk support Possibly more of these built than any other model Perq 3 A completely different architecture Not the real Perq by any means I m very unclear on the specs for these machines As I was privy to some inside company info the Perq 3 was going to be a full 32 bit machine and was actively in development when the company went down Perq IV A t2 with a 24 bit board set and backplane mods This allowed up to 4MB of memory though with 24 address lines 16 MB is the theoretical maximum though to my knowlege 4MB boards were the highest capacity offered CL 166 CHAPTER 34 PERQ MODELS 34 5 Notes on K1 K2 from Brian Rosen When asked about the Krismas system the K1 and the K2 As I recall and I m not too sure of my memory here the K1 was an early prototype of what became the T2 It was called Krismas because the eternal story about when any major project would be finished was around Christmas time so that the constant exhortation for getting finished was Christmas is coming I don t remember the K2 it may have been the board set of a T2 in the old chasis BR mailing list Dec 7 1992 Chapter 35 MPOS PERQ Multiple Process OS e Multiple process capability gives the user the c
121. ering etc CL Oct 10 1992 89 90 CHAPTER 17 DESIGN Chapter 18 PERQ Mass Storage Disk amp Tape The seek complete signals from the drive are not used the microprogram provides more than adequate delays Note this is for 5 1 4 and 8 drives Does this slow the system down Does it cause incompatibility problems with some hard disks 18 1 Fixed Disc Drive Controller 5 1 4 and 8 discs Connection to the drive is by a 50 way stripline from the EIO board off card connector JB Controller commands and parameters are loaded into the controller registers from the I O data bus and the controller returns status to the bus The dedicated controller logic generates all the signals required for head movements head selection and data transfer The DMA controller handles the transfer of data between the disc controller data buffer and the PERQ memory Note that there are at least two types of 5 1 4 hard drive controllers for the PERQ T2 systems one for the ST 506 drives and one specially made controller for the Seagate ST 412 10 MB hard disk The two cannot be interchanged according to Dave Callen According to the PERQ schematics there are also two types of ST 506 controllers one made for Micropolis drives and the other for Maxtor drives 91 92 CHAPTER 18 PERQ MASS STORAGE DISK amp TAPE 18 2 Shugart SA4000 series hard disk PERQI e PERQ has a built in 12 megabyte formatted rigid disk e the disk
122. ernet 3 600 1M Byte floppy drive 8 2 200 24M Byte hard disk 1 600 Memory parity option 700 4K writable control store 4 000 Daisy wheel printer 3 900 Streamer cartridge 4 800 Mag tape option 9 9 track 4 500 Source code for POS 15 000 System software 340 PERQ 1 0 wire wrap board 320 Button cursor 7 300 Extender cable 7 500 Link board set 5 000 16K writable control store 8 000 Paging box 7 6 000 1024KB memory 5 000 Field upgrade costs in addition fo option price for board swapping 16K Memory 2 000 1M Byte 2 000 219 220 CHAPTER 44 PERQ PRICES Paging box 1 500 PERQ AI T2 available for shipment in July 1984 at a price of less than 40 000 single unit quantities The LN3000 with a monochrome display is priced at 25 000 to 35 000 and was available as of May 23 1984 single unit quantities The AI work station not available until July 1984 Chapter 45 Laser printer Any laser printer with the raw Canon CX engine should work with the PERQs The line SID CanonCX needs to be in the default profile file following Login in order for screen dumps to work under POS Essentially what you want is the raw Canon CX engine I have two with the Interleaf label slapped on them They have a 37 pin D type connector that is not Centronics compatible In your PERQ you need a Canon controller or a combination Ethernet Canon board referred to a
123. ersions linked and contiguous files security protection e access to files on other PERQ systems as easy as if they were stored on the local disk e all critical information is redundantly stored and verification checks on disk operations insure the integrity of files 35 2 MPOS Display Window Manager e the window manager partitions the screen into separate areas or win dows windows may be moved around the screen enlarged or contracted in two dimensions scrolled and clipped under direct user control windows can overlap each other and can be as large as the entire screen or as small as a postage stamp menus and light buttons are also supported by the window manager the process mechanism uses the window manager to allow direct user control of multiple concurrent processes 35 3 WEEKEND WONDER CREW 169 35 3 Weekend Wonder Crew It took more that one weekend to get the whole job done but most of it was done in the 2 day extravaganza I don t remember everyone who participated but John Strait Don Scelza Brad Myers and I were there There must have been 3 or 4 others but I don t recall who 170 CHAPTER 35 MPOS PERQ MULTIPLE PROCESS OS Chapter 36 PERQ Mysteries to be solved e What where was Alpha this was where action items were dis cussed on Jan 10 1983 e Why wasn t the floating point hardware used e According to the T2 Service Guide the OIO board has the link logic
124. es 4 1 1 Historical notes from Chris Lamb The Perq was the first commercially available machine in its class Though Xerox built the Alto and other experimental machines they were not offered for sale to the public The Perq could be called the first 3 M machine 1 MIP computing power 1 Megapixel display ok the portrait was slightly less than a million pixels if you re being pedantic and 1 Meg of RAM in a single user system That was a very important milestone in computing and the Perq really did define the whole industry Apollo and Sun and all the others that followed took years to build a system around commercial microprocessor that could compete with the Perq for graphics performance The Perq really did push the envelope for 30 000 USD in 1980 you had the most powerful single user computer available 36 CHAPTER 4 MORE PERQ HISTORY with excellent graphics performance on a 100 dpi display a local 24MB disk a megabyte of memory sound output RS232 GPIB and Ethernet ports and that in and of itself was an astonishing feat Outside of the US ICL was pushing PNX which just happens to be the first Unix with an in kernel window manager and distributed file service etc Inside the US Accent was paving the way in distributed OS research with an elegant microkernel they squeezed it into 16K of WCS with two language instruction sets and room to spare and a new and powerful window manager when X was
125. es Multibus Laser Option board 153 32 PERQ Memory System 155 32 1 Memory Access ssp osso nk rac ee 156 32 2 Direct Memory Access DMA 156 322 1 BERQ uum ae p ume RIA ER eL 157 32 2 2 DERQ2 T2 EN3000 5 vr 3 2 A 8 157 33 PERQ Microcode 159 34 Perq models 163 34 1 High performance LN3000 series 163 34 1 1 PERQ LN3500 PERQ AI PERQ T2 hardware 163 34 1 2 PERQ Color Workstation 163 34 1 3 PERQ Audre Still basically a T2 163 34 14 Notes ee ee ea 164 342 PERO TA sha a Lue ere an Voce ce 164 34 8 PERQ 3 and PERQ 5 llle 164 34 4 Notes on PERQ models from Chris Lamb 165 34 5 Notes on K1 K2 from Brian 166 35 MPOS PERQ Multiple Process OS 167 35 1 MPOS Filesystem 168 35 2 MPOS Display Window Manager 168 35 8 Weekend Wonder Crew 169 36 PERQ Mysteries to be solved 171 37 Various names of people associated with PERQs 173 37 1 Individuals s s cr so m xo ee ee 173 372 Companies s 3 ok A de ow Deeg a tla 177 38 PERQ Network 38 1 OSLAN and OSLAN Interface Controller 38 1 1 PERQI 38 2 Ethernet 38 3 XNS 384 LINQ 38 5 Cambridge Ring 38 6 Getting TCP IP Working 38 7 Eth Can board 38 8 Ethernet Connections 38 9 FTP to Sun 39 PERQ Keeper s Guide 40 PERQ vs NeXT 41 PNX
126. escriptions of CPU etc here 252 CHAPTER 56 TECHNICAL MISCELLANY One of PERQ Systems former employees Robert Colwell who was also one of the engineers who worked on the design of the PERQ color display had the following to say about the PERQs architecture This architecture is like the victorian home in Texas where they kept adding rooms until there were hundreds corridors to blank walls steps that go and come back down without going anywhere levels windows and doors scattered hither and yon The owner was a major league eccentric But the tourists keep on coming There had been plans to implement numeric co processor circuitry using an Intel 8087 but this idea was abandoned This coprocessor was to reside on the I O board although the plans for its implementation appeared to have been abandoned the evidence of thie remained Looking at a PERQ I O board one can see where the circuitry for the coprocessor was supposed to be the traces for it are there and the holes for the chips have been drilled even the outline for the chip has been drawn Unfortunately an effort to continue on into the future with this type of architecture was halted when PERQ Systems could not obtain the fi nancing necessary to produce a scaled down version of the same basic CPU Functionally this new CPU would have been basically the same as the orig inal PERQ CPU with the exception that it would have been much smaller faster and more reliable
127. eting rights to the PERQ in the UK all of Europe and in a number of other countries This arrangement worked well for several years This resulted in a strong partnership between Three Rivers Computer Company ICL SERC and which later included CMU which already had strong ties with 3RCC Friday September 1 1981 CMU received its 100th computer from Three Rivers this was a ceremonial delivery since CMU purchased the first Perq computer October 1981 Version 1 6 of the Perq Color Display Document writ Conflict SERC paper says it was first 22 CHAPTER 2 HISTORY ten 1982 Plans for MPOS multitasking POS put on hold this OS was developed by Brian Rosen Brad Meyers and a few others This OS was never released to the public January 1982 ICL begins manufacturing PERQs in the UK March 1982 Chairman Edgar Fredkin and president Jim Gay resign New chairman Richard Rifenburgh and new president Aaron Coleman June 1982 The targeted completion date by RAL to move Unix Version 7 to the PERQ to run on top of the Accent kernel July 1982 SERC Document written J M Loveluck Rutherford Ap pleton Lab Perq Color Display Document Colwell Kriz Stoner revision 2 0 was written It was claimed that retrofitting the Perq for color would be easy 2 14 1982 1983 ICL bought the world wide marketing rights excluding sales within the United States to the PERQ and added a FORTRAN compiler to Perqs running under POS or
128. etwork Operating System Generalized Path Expressions A High Level Debugging Mechanism PERQs Accent Kelly Hickel his listing from Who s Who in High Technology Horizontal deflection board documentation PERQ 3 file htext The ICL Three Rivers PERQ and Distributed Interactive Computing by J M Loveluck and F R A Hopgood Rutherford Appleton Labs from Comput amp Graphics magazine 1983 Integrated Project Support Environments John McDonald The Integration of Virtual Memory Management and Interprocess Com munication in Accent full article abstract IP TCP for POS Project Description by Chuck Beckett April 5 1982 3 pages An Interactive Graphics Editor for Document Preparation PERQs KMS A Distributed Hypermedia System for Managing Knowlege in Organizations PERQs ZOG List of Fundamental Building Blocks Neded for the S A Z Mixer and C R Chip Designs PERQ 3 List of Questions About the Vipor Video System PERQ 3 113 Low Resolution Landscape Monitor Timing for 90 Hz Frame Rate file 1s86hz t mail messages to files on SPICE VAX at CMU file getmail txt Mars Closes UNIX DOS Gap Mars Wins Race to Announce SPARC and Intel based Machine Matsushita Pays 8M for 62 of Office Workstations Ltd PERQs MegaScan Allows Viewing of Images as they will be Output P C Week MegaScan Leaving Town Pgh Business Times MegaSc
129. eves that product support and corporate re sponse to emerging market requirements are fundamental In devel oping PERQ Al many experts from major universities which ones aside from CMU and research institutions were consulted In sup porting PERQ Al PERQ systems is always responsive to customer needs from installation and training through on going customer service and product enhancement According to PERQ Systems Corp President Aaron Coleman PERQ Al represents a breakthrough in artificial intelligence workstations as well as a symbol of our transformation to a company providing high performance network systems from May 15 1984 press release Back in 1980 we pioneered a new concept in computing Markets PERQs were aimed at 7 1 PERQ 1 55 e electronic technical publishing e university and corporate research e artificial intelligence e federal and special systems Navy and CIA e computer aided design CAD e computer aided engineering CAE International sales nearly 4596 of sales were international Overseas PERQs were sold through these major distributers e In the UK Europe Asia and Australia International Computers Ltd ICL Europe s largest computer company e In Japan by Rikei e In India by OMC Corp 7 1 1 PERQ Systems and cooperative agreements PERQ Systems has sought cooperative relationships with other companies such as ICL in the United Kingdom and OMC Corp in India involving joi
130. f Accent is its ability to support multiple co equal environments 5 3 Accent Window Manager Sapphire Windows act as multiple virtual displays they are rectangular regions of the screen that contain one or more processes Windows can be fully visible partially visible partially covered or totally covered while the processes are operating as well as when they are idle Window size and location are dynamically alterable by the user or by program All window manager functions can be invoked by the mouse the keyboard or by a user program Up to 64 windows can concurrently exist either on or off the screen Offers protected access to rectangular bitmaps including graphics raster op line drawing special string display functions and special typesetting functions Characters are written on the screen by passing character strings to the window manager together with font and positioning data Font data is stored as bitmaps Icons are provided to assist the user in wondow control and actively monitor process status The Accent window manager features a unique icon system which is superior to previous work Unlike older systems where icons represent closed or inactive windows Accent icons are always visible whether or not a window is on screen Icons are used to assist in window control and in monitoring process status Each icon contains the name of the process indicators for Attention and Waiting for input and percent done progres
131. for exceptions March 15 1981 JPS Add code to shrink and expand screen Caution The Shell must never be loaded when the screen is small because it might allocate a buffer for a command file This buffer will hang around after the shell returns to the system 276CHAPTER 62 INTERESTING NOTES FROM POS G 2 SOURCE CODE System pas change log Change system letter System pas change log Change system letter Feb 18 1983 to G March 4 1982 to System pas change log February 16 1981 Change system letter to C From system pas change log DCF Feb 11 1981 Command interpreter made separate from system From system pas change log JPS Oct 10 1980 Support added for DDS From system pas Jan 5 1983 Made changes that allow use of Ethernet if system was booted from floppy From system pas August 16 1982 Added new variables to permit selection of either Kriz Tablet of BitPad Permit true relative mode for either 277 From System pas December 1 1981 C C clear as S From System pas June 1 1981 Do automatic re enable of swapping if turned off by shell i e for Scavenger From System pas May 13 1981 procedures to enable and disable control C processing From System pas April 6 1981 Virtual memory and timing statistics From System pas
132. for proposals to which 3RCC responded The first showing of the Perq was as Siggraph 1980 and the first machine was delivered to CMU in late 80 or early 81 It had 256K of memory 27MB disk 14 4K of writable control store an 8 floppy disk and a 768 x 1024 monochrome raster display At the time Sun and Apollo were dreams The Perq had a lot in common with the Alto but was significantly different in many ways One of the early customers for Perq was Bob Hopgood at Ruther ford Appleton Labs in the U K His enthusiasm for the Perq caused the Science and Engineering Research Council SERC to try to adopt it as a computing platform for SERC sponsored research However SERC could not go around pushing a U S system So it influenced ICL to enter into a collaborative effort with 3RCC to make PERQs in the U K Eventually ICL provided some funding for 3RCC and engaged in some co operative R D efforts 3RCC which changed its name to PERQ Systems in around 1983 never had stable financing made several management mistakes never had effective marketing waited too long to switch to micro processors and foolishly followed CMU s efforts on operating system development Accent precursor to Mach was Vice President of Engineering through much of the above so I ll take most of the blame if you wish Perq went belly up in 1985 when its investors refused to supply any further funding A note about PERQ history from Robert Rae of July 3
133. g Written by Malcolm Shute this is was as of Feb 15 1993 descriptions by Malcolm MJS000 assorted utility programs calc pas a simple desk calculator complete create pas a note book to create a file without clearing the screen complete 240 MJS009 MJS010 MJS011 MJS001 MJS003 MJS005 MJS002 MJS004 MJS006 MJS007 MJS008 CHAPTER 51 PERQ SOFTWARE wc pas line word and character counter counte for a file com plete diff pas gives a true false answer for if two files are identical complete sed pas stream editor complete deltree cmd delete a whole tree of directories subdirectories and files complete cpa pas critical path analysis complete but subject to future en hancements copytree pas awaiting inspiration spell pas spelling checker awaiting a program that sorts lines in a file into order and awaiting VMS to PERQ conversion spelling pas a spelling and times tables test for 7 year olds complete abotec pas a spreadsheet program for engineering design awaiting SUN to PERQ conversion turtle pas a program to draw pictures on the screen by leaving a trail of asterisks to act as a vehicle to teach pascal programming to 7 year olds complete typehit pas a program to teach you to touch type using the medium of a Dungeons and Dragons type game monsters have home key names on Level 1 and successively harder key combinations o
134. gic the Autologic company of Newbury Park CA contractual buyer of the interface system specified by the requirement document REQ PO What is this document Note Autologic made an IBM lookalike mainframe computer e Graphic Horizons this name appears in some cmd files Graphic Horizons GetPut program Apparently they must have written a program named GetPut that adds a header to the cmd files that it creates Contact Vicky Nosbisch and see if she can find anything out about this e The Interlan company of Massachussetts supplier of the QBus Ethernet interface board for the Autologic project Accent Systems Corp 5907 Penn Avenue Pittsburgh PA 15206 1 412 361 3200 Richard Cox Pres PERQ Addresses Three Rivers Computer Corporation 3RCC 720 Gross Street Pittsburgh PA 15224 1 412 621 6250 Note above was the former Gulf Oil 7 building PERQ Systems Corp 2600 Liberty Avenue P O Box 2600 Pittsburgh PA 15230 178CHAPTER 37 VARIOUS NAMES OF PEOPLE ASSOCIATED WITH PERQS 1 412 355 0900 1 800 222 4489 Chapter 38 PERQ Network The Ethernet and Cambridge Ring networks on a PERQ can operate at speeds of up to 10 MBits per second 38 1 OSLAN and OSLAN Interface Controller These logic circuits provide the PERQ interface to an ICL open system local area network Transceiver Unit The EIO board circuits provide data encapsulation and help in the data link management A microsecond clock timer
135. he PNX Unix Version 7 System III Unix for the Perq develop ment the Perq s microcode was changed from its original Q Code similar to P Code to a form of microcode which was more appropriate to the C programming language 2 16 1984 ICL s Dallkeith development center near Edinburgh Scotland was closed down and Spider Systems was formed One of the co founders of Spider Systems was involved in the development of Perg hardware Spider Systems working with Perq Systems PQS implemented a layer of Unix which ran on top of the Accent OS Was this QNIX When the computer slowdown occured in 1984 Three Rivers Computer began to go under At this time Accent Systems split up from them pri marily as a maintenence operation for the support of the PERQs Towards this end Three Rivers changed its name to PERQ Systems In 1984 Perq Systems began working on the Perq3 project this was a 68020 based machine with seperate I O and raster processors The main memory consisted of 8 Megabytes of RAM Fall 1984 It was realized at CMU that a new hardware base would be needed for the Accent OS if Accent was to be spared the same fate that RIG met up with There was also the problem of Accent running a Unix compatibility package QNIX not being able to run many pieces of Unix software which were being written at the time Mach an OS similar to Accent was then conceived It was to be completely compatible with Unix and would run on a wide var
136. here be 177 A B NOT A NOT B AND B AND NOT B NAND B OR B OR NOT B NOR B XOR B XNOR B A B 01 A B OldCarry gt gt gt gt gt gt gt gt e OldCarry is the carry from the imediately preceeding microinstruction and is used for multiple precision arithmetic e The A field of a microinstruction contains the select lines used to drive the AMux It selects Shifter output NextOP IOD MDI MDX UState XY register at the location specified by the X field and the top of the expression stack 238 CHAPTER 51 PERQ SOFTWARE e The B field of a microinstruction contains the BMux select line If B is set the BMux selects a constant Otherwise BMux selects the register specified by the Y field contents e The X field contains the address for the X port This same field is used to reference a given register in the XY file for a register write operation e The Y field contains the address for the Y port It can also be used as the low order byte of a constant e Microstate condition codes can be read as the Microstate Registers UState via the AMux e The shift matrix Shift can be accesses by loading an item to be shifted via the R bus and reading the shifted result on the AMux e Addressed micro instructions are buffered in a 48 bit micro instruction register e Various fields of a microinstruction control operand selection mill function what is this
137. hics routines 42 5 POS D 265 Appears to be a fairly standard POS D system with one exception it has a CMU modified streams package it allows command history recall command line editing using Emacs commands like the Accent shell When it boots up it prints almost a half page of commands The person who built the system used an old English type of font 42 6 POS F 2 Required new PROMs on I O and CPU boards Major changes to I O subsystem e Volume system This subsystem provides the new interfaces to the hard disk 42 7 U S VERSIONS VS U K VERSIONS 213 e A great deal of functionality has been added to POS RS 232 support e New functionality added to GPIB 42 7 U S versions vs U K versions In the U K versions of POS were apparently numbered differently For examle there were versions of POS such as R 4 and R 5 42 8 FixPart FixPart can be used to repair a corrupt DIB It knows the names of all the existing partitions so it should be necessary to only name the device Sys again 42 9 QCode Assembler There is no seperate Q code assembler under POS the Pascal and Fortran 77 compilers write the SEG files directly not as a seperate pass through a seperate program You can however use QDis to disassemble a compler program and look at the output of the compiler for whatever good that does CL 42 10 Scavenger T used to think that neat pattern from Scavenger was actually s
138. hran ICL Dalkeith write Rs232 test software e Ellen Colwell 173 174CHAPTER 37 VARIOUS NAMES OF PEOPLE ASSOCIATED WITH PERQS e Robert P Colwell co authored the PERQ Color Display Concept Document July 1982 e Richard Cox president of Accent Systems during time when the Max Pro environment was being sold e Ed Fredkin e Jim Gay e Carol Geyer at PERQ systems contact for Accent announcement May 15 1984 412 335 0900 e A Hanzawa did programming for PERQ Tetris 1989 e Lee Harris assigned to prepare burn in software e Jeff Howell e Rich Huber Used to program the test system used to manufacture PERQs and now works for Brian Rosen at Mars Had a running PERQ as of December 1992 according to Brian Rosen e K Hughes ICL Delkeith worked on RS232 test program e Dill Hulley designed fixture for setting time of day clock e I M Elliot testcontrol pas e Kelly F Hickel Accent Systems modified MBUS Pas e Horst There was this guy named Horst I can t remember his last name who was a CMU guy into ADA He was hired by Siemens Research who co operated with CMU on ADA projects including a start at ADA for ACCENT Horst didn t do the work but another CMU grad student was hired by Siemens to work for Horst did it Brian Rosen mailing list Jan 5 1993 e Sandeep Johar Wrote design document for Autologic Development project titled PERQ Interface Design the req document details the
139. id 1980 s The U S Navy or USAF spent 2 000 000 in R amp D in order to use Perq s on the U S S Carl Vinson an aircraft carrier The Perq s was to be used to monitor ship operations repairs and the deployment of aircraft Some related project called ZOG was being worked on at CMU ZOG is now known as KMS which is being developed by a company called Knowlege Systems Inc in Murrysville near Pittsburgh and had been ported over to run on Sun and Apollo machines instead of the Perqs KMS is described as a hypermedia product Siemens Corp US used the Perqs for artificial intelligence research Note this was at Siemens at Forrestal Center 105 College Road East 3rd floor Princeton NJ 28 CHAPTER 2 HISTORY On some of the early Perqs the floating point microcode was slightly error prone for example 10 0 10 0 98 9 Which version s of the software contained this flaw The appearance of the SUN 2 was largely responsible for PERQs demise VP and the SUN 3 was the last nail in Perq s coffin CL When did these SUNs appear on the market 84 85 A lot of work was done with the PERQs at The University of Kent at Canterbury UKC including the development of a new windowing man ager a pattern grey ness editor debugger higher lavel graphics interface amongst many other things Also Peter J Brown did a system called GUIDE which was something like a hypertext system You have a text system where certain words
140. iety of hardware other than the PERQs gt Mars Microsystems Three Rivers PERQ Systens Accent Computer _ gt Corp gt Systems gt Woe is gt MegaScan 1 Inc 24 CHAPTER 2 HISTORY 2 17 1985 In September of 1985 Perq Systems went out of business and their work on the Perg 3 project ceased CMU stopped buying PERQs they had previously been purchasing them due to close ties between the CS faculty and Three Rivers many people were forced to use PERQs for their projects and a users revolt ensued Within a year many of CMU s one hundred and fifty PERQs vanished from CMU A few were sold to customers of Three Rivers Computer PERQ but the majority of them were sold for scrap metal for 5 apiece to a local surplus dealer Varityper purchased the manufacturing rights to the Perq T 2 but soon discontinued the manufacture of them Some of the members of PERQ Systems software team returned to CMU such as Dave Golub who became involved in the Mach OS When PERQ Systems Corp went out of business several new firms arose from the ashes As this is being written June 23 1991 the most direct descendent of PERQ Systems Accent Systems is on ts very last legs It no longer goes by its original name It is interesting to also note that as of 1990 T hree Rivers Computer was still listed in the Thomas Register Accent Systems star
141. illiseconds data transfer rate 1 859 Mbytes per second MTBF more than 10 000 power on hours can be mounted in the model 3411 expansion cabinet s 19 inch rack According to Brian Rosen mailing list Dec 9 1992 there were not many PERQ systems made that used these 18 9 Tape controller 9 track the model 3458 tape controller is capable of handling 1 2 magnetic start stop or streaming drives capable of controlling up to 8 start stop or streaming PE or NZRI formatted drives full 24 bit addressing DMA operation buffered direct or streaming data transfer modes bus lock option during DMA transfers programmable interrupt option on board 4K buffer standard up to 16K optional automatic retry for all recoverable errors 18 10 STREAMING TAPE CONTROLLER 99 18 10 Streaming tape controller e part ofthe M LO board e allows for the direct connection of the QIC 02 streaming model 3521 tape drive Note by building a special board not normally available to Perq cus tomers it is possible to use the streaming tape drive with either POS or Accent No multibus board is required for this The special tape controller board requires very few parts and may be plugged into either the OIO or the CPU option slot Some notes about building the board are in my message to Chris Lamb of Aug 19 1991 18 11 Tape drive 9 track e model 3457 1 2 magnetic tape drive mfr Pertec e fully automatic loading e 25 IPS start
142. inal size after returning from a user program From Virtual pas If system is booted from a floppy up to 1 MB of virtual memory is available if booted from the hard disk up to 31 MB of virtual memory is available When memory is needed e g a certain size of contigious memory an attempt is made to find a memory hole of appropriate size If not found an attempt at compacting memory and then finding an appropriately sized hole in memory again If this fails to provide needed memory memory will be swapped out Memory compaction is done by moving as many segments as possible towards low addresses System segments those with a reference count 279 greater than one will not be moved into the screen area as segments cannot jump over one another A note found in RealFunctions pas DISCLAIMER Only the most cursory testing of these functions has been done No guarantees are made as to the accuracy or correctness of the functions Validation of the functions must be done but at some later date From Perq2KetTest pas The break key on the Krismas keyboard overlaps the cursor control keys Thus it cannot be distinguished from them based on keyboard input From TestEther pas page 8 procedure Allocate Note This procedure is an incredible hack The EtherBuffer must be allocated on a one thousand word boundary To do this we must do some interesting hacking Also the segment that is created must be m
143. int Server PERQ XNS protocols have been implemented in conjunction with PERQ s Accent distributed operating system 38 4 LINQ LINQ is PERQ Systems local area network LINQ extends proven ethernet technology with a unique operating system Accent One of the most important aspects of LINQ is that it incorporates a message based operating system Accent that is fundamentally designed to enhance network services T his results in a simpler user interface both at the programming level and for the user himself who doesn t need to waste time locating creatng and monitoring activities at other network nodes A user can obtain data or access resources that are available some where else on the network or even on a different network either locally or remotely without the need to know the location of that data or resource LINQ features multiple co equal environments for optimal software de velopment and operational flexibility These environments include the native Accent environment an advanced UNIX environment licensed from AT amp T 38 5 CAMBRIDGE RING 183 QNIX and a Lisp environment for Artificial Intelligence applications A single workstaion can simultaneously run applications in these environments The four major elements of the LINQ network are e the network operating system Accent network hardware LINQ board ethernet stuff etc e software development environment e applications software systems Gateways enable LI
144. io Wolczko 61 1 Replies to CMU PERQ Haters So the PERQ Fanatics are back eh So the first post I receive is a flame from a CMU guy How fitting 61 1 REPLIES TO CMU PERQ HATERS 263 I know that the PERQ has its quirks I ve been through enough of those ill timed spectacular only on the PERQ crashes and I ve muttered a few curses at the beast in my day But I love the PERQ for the same reason that I m a NeXT Fanatic now Somebody had to be first and somebody had to raise the bar It is a curious twist of human nature to resist and fear change and innovaton as powerfully as we tend to do because we are probably the most adaptable creatures on the planet But maybe I just like cheering for the underdog or maybe I just like abuse The PERQ started the revolution NeXT continues it Someone else down the road will cary it further reset In the meantime perhaps the CMU guys can think on this Three Rivers had a pretty tight relationship with them sales of early machines development of Accent etc and they went under NeXT had a pretty tight relationship too choosing Mach as their kernel investment money from CMU etc and now they ve had to cease hardware production and struggle to maintain as a software only company Two companies that did bleeding edge stuff were tied to CMU and had have a very difficult time in the marketplace COINCIDENCE Perhaps CMU much as I like the pla
145. is file as the last line The EOF marker in this file must not be disturbed 102 CHAPTER 18 PERQ MASS STORAGE DISK amp TAPE 18 14 Adding a SCSI interface for Disc or Tape Chris Lamb has microcode examples of how to write the microcode to set up a DMA channel And if you think about it the protocol between the PERQ and the SCSI chip would be MUCH simpler than the Shugart stuff and I bet even less of a hassle than the EIO disk inter face Since SCSI is a very high level from the host s point of view it would really just be an issue of learning how to talk on the bus and how to fit in with the other boards and talk DMA If you think about it that s probably all the streamer board is a generic Perq interface that passes commands between the mi crocode and the intelligent conroller on the tape drive So if I went with the second idea of building a sort of secondary EIO board it would be just like how the Perq currently deals with the Z80 CL March 24 1992 Chapter 19 PERQ Display Recall that the Perg had its frame buffers reside in main memory and the CPU got every other memory access poor man s dual porting Robert Colwell Makes use of 64 bit parallel RasterOp hardware Data for the display screen is written by the CPU to an area of memory allocated for that purpose The black and white monitor is driven from the display control on the memory board The display assembly box holds this is for the P
146. is provided to help in sorting out collisions on the network The timer is set by software and interrupts the PERQ CPU The DMA controller handles the transfer of data between the OSLAN controller buffers and the PERQ memory Separate channels are used for transmitted and received data but transfers are not simultaneous Open systems OS means that different manufacturers equipment can be connected to the LAN Every packet of information has a 48 bit header which specifies a unique destination device address All devices listen to every packet of information transmitted This is a baseband system The OSLAN transmission rate is 10 million bits per second 10 MBits The ICL OSLAN is like Ethernet It is a contention network using broad cast techniques The method of accessing the network is called CSMA CD That is carrier sense multiple access collision detection CSMA is some times called listen before transmission CSMA CD is sometimes called listen while transmitting as well as listening before 179 180 CHAPTER 38 PERQ NETWORK 38 1 1 PERQ1 e proprietary wide band network interconnects PERQ systems on a sin gle coaxial cable using cable TV technology e up to 64 PERQ workstations can be connected on up to 2000 of cable e up to 1024 PERQs can be interconnected on a single coaxial cable with a maximum distance of 2 5 km e broadcasting packets of data at 10 megabits per second the network allows one PERQ to acce
147. is there some possible connection similarity be tween Wirth s Lilith computer system and the Alto or PERQ 2 6 1974 When Brian Rosen and Stan Kriz graduated they worked at the university for several years and started the Three Rivers Computer corporation in 1974 When Three Rivers started it specialized in producing high quality graphics equipment Three Rivers Computer started out in the basement of four of the founders who lived on Craig Street in Oakland Brian Rosen went off to work at XEROX s PARC The Systems Development Division of Xerox was formed to exploit the features of the Alto for office automation purposes Two new systems were the result of this effort the Dolphin 1976 and the Dandelion Of the two the Dolphin bore the most similarities to the PERQ Brian Rosen and first name Charney who were from Three Rivers were part of the five man design team for the Dolphin The majority of the design work for the Dolphin was done by Charney The Dolphin was intended to become 18 CHAPTER 2 HISTORY the Star processor however after it was completed Xerox decided that it was too expensive The Dandelion was then chosen to replace the Dolphin as the 8010 Star workstation since it was less expensive There were a lot of internal problems politics at Xerox regarding the decision not to market the Dolphin As a result of this Brian Rosen returned to Three Rivers Computer with ideas for the PERQ 2 7 1975
148. it was the original compiler guru most of the language constructs are his work He was a Pascal purist and was always trying to keep extensions and changes to a minimum Brian Rosen mailing list Jan 6 1993 e Keith Tarvido Accent Systems wrote part of MBUS Pas e M J Tough ICL Dalkeith worked on confidence test shell testcon trol pas in 1982 e Tim Taylor e Bob Tysarczyk e Terry Vavra Terry Vavra did lots of silly artwork and icons and such His machine at 3RCC s Advanced Development office had a coin slot on it and some silly stickers and such Brian may tell us what Terry s job title was but from what I gather it was mostly doing silly drawings and stuff He did the icons for PerqMan CL Dec 30 1992 e Terry was a technician who was very creative He worked for engi neering and advanced development for several years He was indeed a wiz at cobbling up icons and silly pictures We did keep him busy building hardware but he would come in extra hours to play BR mailing list Jan 4 1993 e Andy Verostic e Tony Vezza e T J Watson testcontrol pas e V Wilson testcontrol pas e Ken Young e Dale ICL e John 5 in Chelmsford England e Fred in Chelmsford England e REH revised calc program 37 2 COMPANIES 177 37 2 Companies e Auscom Inc of Austin Texas supplier of the final hardware config uration to support the Autologic interface project e Autolo
149. kstations was formed The head of engineering at Prime Computer William Poduska started Apollo Apollo had the added benefit of much more financial backing than Three Rivers had Apollo introduced its Domain processor 2 13 1981 January 1981 Edward Fredkin drafts James Gay from Information Int l to become President of Three Rivers April 1981 The first line of code for the Accent OS is written Note there is a conflict here The above statement was derived from the publication From RIG to Accent to Mach Rashid page 4 Refer to the time period for September 1980 to see the conflict Should this date have been April of 1980 Note Accent is a registered trademark of Accent International Inc and the product which Accent designates is sold as a spice which contains only monosodium glutamate Soon after the PERQ went into production Apollo got ahold of the idea of what Three Rivers was doing and got ahead of them Apollo was able to deliver the first Apollo Domain in the fall of 1981 a great big deal was made over the new Apollo system It entered into the 2 13 1981 21 fledgling workstation market with a much higher profile than the PERQ had Note there is a possible conflict here this information comes from the company confidential stuff in the Perq 3 design docs notebook the article in Venture states that the Apollo Domain was introduced in 1980 was it just announced to the public then or was it actually produced
150. le instead Addendum yes this refers to compatibility with IBM 8 disks Answer yes This refers to the 8 floppy drive Interface connections to the single floppy drive within the processor cabinet are carried by a 50 way stripline and the EIO board off card con nector JA The PD765 floppy disc controller chip on the Z80 bus takes commands and parameters from the Z80 CPU This chip has direct access to the Z80 memory for data byte transfers The track to track seek time is 8 milliseconds Serial data is transferred to and from the diskette at 62 5 KBytes per second Other specs 8 double sided double density soft sectored 1 Mbyte formatted capacity e rotational speed 360 rpm e average access time 96 ms e transfer rate 62 5 Kbytes sec 94 CHAPTER 18 PERQ MASS STORAGE DISK amp TAPE e average latency 83 3 ms e head load time 50 ms e settling time 15 ms e track to track seek 3 ms Floppy drive was tested to see if it could withstand 100V 10V for use in Japan It can withstand this The front of floppy drives is slightly wider for the T2 systems than for the PERQI systems the cover in the PERQI systems will not fit back on if a floppy from a T2 is installed Aside from this however PERQI and PERQ T2 floppy drives may be substituted Deceptive floppy directory listing I noticed that the same floppy can appear to be both a file system floppy as well as an RT 11 floppy For example when I i
151. llowing features 16 4 WRITABLE CONTROL STORE 83 e The percent sign which signals the use of the base register may only be used on the PERQIA e MQ RBase Victim LeapPop Goto shift MultiplyStep and Di videStep may be only used on the PERQIA e LatchMA may only be used on the PERQI 16 4 Writable Control Store The 48 bit micro instructions are held in the control store This store con sists of e Read only memory ROM holding instructions used during the first phase of system establishment and then disable e Random access memory RAM loaded during system establishment The PERQ T2 version of the CPU board has a control store of 16K 48 bit words microinstructions Microprograms reside in a writeable control store WCS 16 5 Micro Sequencer e Addresses the control store e Is a complex single chip micro sequencer e Has a 5 level call stack e Inputs are jump parameters interrupts and operands e Allows the execution of one microinstruction while fetching the next micro instruction from the control store e Uses the first byts of each Q or C code instruction to form the start address of the microcode that executes it 84 CHAPTER 16 THE PERQ CPU 16 6 Micro instructions Addressed micro instructions are buffered in a 48 bit micro instruction reg ister from which the various fields control operand selection mill function jump conditions and memory access Single instructions combine arithmetic or logic
152. ltiple language support e demand paging e advanced virtual memory management e a multi process message based operating system e provides a 32 bit paged virtual address space for each user process e workstation memory and disk space are managed by a demand paging feature which offers a 512 byte page size 39 40 CHAPTER 5 THE ACCENT OS e another facet of Accent substantially reduces network traffic by per mitting users to access remote files without the need to transfer all the information to their own disk Only those file pages that are actually needed are moved e priority scheduling with preemption and aging e compute bound processes those that don t require user interaction are automatically lowered in priority giving faster response to current user commands e the Accent user interface includes a multiple window display controlled by the Accent window manager Users can simultaneously access as many as 64 different windows on the screen These windows can be overlapped and manipulated on the screen as if they were papers on a desk A series of icons displays the status of each active process e Languages supported include Pascal FORTRAN 77 LISP ADA Adaplus from Siemens CMU Modula 2 and C e A messge based multiprocess operating system providing a demand paged 32 bit virtual address space for each user process e designed to be a truly distributed transparent operating environment e network wide interpro
153. m POS From now on you must scavenge each new partition that will be used by Accent by using the Accent Scavenger program Additionally you must continue to use the Scavenger from Accent only for the following additional reason if you have any bootable Accent partitions that are outside of the boundaries accessible by POS all boots from these partitions will be deleted by the POS Scavenger progran The problem of unusable and undeletable files is due to a bug in Accent that is documented in some of the Accent source code Be forwarned if you do not follow the above procedures you could be in for a few unsettling problens Misc WARNING Track O where the boot information block resides on a PERQ1 with a 14 Shugart drive is close to the center of the disk On the 5 1 4 drives used on the PERQ T 2 this track is near the outside of the platter For this erason you should not use the wait switch to park the heads of 5 1 4 drives the heads will be moved to the wrong place If the disk information block gets messed up Scavenger can be run to get information back even if it can t find partitions after going in with newpart Sometimes the PERQ1 will get confused and think that the hard disk has four heads insteadd of eight Disktest can be used to fix this problem Be sure to perform a non destructive reformat every six months or so to avoid the decaying of the magnetic fields on the disk You should especially do this and
154. m developed which took advantage of the Archived field RDD The fillers in headers which are used as hints to the new head of the free list when a block is allocated in a partition by AllocDisk have been represented as unsigned 16 bit numbers denoting disk relative logical block numbers For disks larger than 64K blocks this is not possible and a partition relative denotation is used instead on all future disks FillerSemantics is the type of field in the DIB of a disk which tells which interpretarion applies for that disk From filedir pas Maximum directory levels 9 From filedir pas page 5 About the algorythm used to look up and delete files THIS ALGORYTHM MAY FAIL to find a valid entry if there have been lot of deletes and no enters which helps explain why POS sometimes doesn t acknowledge the existance of some files displayed by a dirctory listing RDD From fileutils pas One cannot create a firectory named ROOT DR because this is a reserved name From iodisk pas change log of Nov 40 1982 Module rewritten for support of multiple disks including all disks Micropolis Shugart and SMD partially This code will run on a CIO and EIO system A new control structure the DCA was created for managing multiple disks 286CHAPTER 62 INTERESTING NOTES FROM POS G 2 SOURCE CODE From iokeyboard pas Constant used to represent shift control c was BlamCh Bl
155. mic RAM DRAM e Interrupt steering for direct entry to Z80 service routines for devices interfaced through the Z80 system e The Z80 system peripherals interface circuits the floppy drive interface the GPIB Serial input output the floating point unit Real time clock 27 3 LN3000 e 1 0 controller for high speed devices multiplexes up to 6 simultaneous DMA channels at up to 10 Mbits sec each two DMA channels for user options e dedicated microprocessor to control low speed devices 27 4 EIO Board Ethernet I O The same board is used for both the T1 and 2 systems But two links JP2 and JP3 must be fitted to the board when used with T2 5 25 inch disks Links JP2 and JP3 must not be present when the board is used with T 1 8 inch disks The EIO board provides control for e fixed disc drive 27 5 BOARD OTHER 1 0 141 floppy disc drive keyboard standard tablet OSLAN connection two RS232 interfaces a GPIB speech output This board also holds a real time clock calendar The EIO board circuits for control and data servicing of peripherals fall into two groups state machines for the fixed disc and OSLAN connection the I O Z80 microprocessor system controlling the other devices 27 5 OIO Board Other I O The optional input output board can hold logic circuits for three interfaces These circuits are for the PERQ to PERQ strip line link OSLAN connection Cano
156. n mailing list Dec 9 1992 I was dumped out of PNX into some form of low level interface to the PERQ there was an prompt I could get the PC contents but was unable to find the continue command Would anyone like to enlighten me as to what commands are available Robert Marshall mailing list Dec 21 1992 Chapter 42 POS PERQ Operating System POS provides e job management e virtual memory association e swapping e 1 O services e lile System e Window screen manager e Timekeeping functions e PASCAL routine support e Operating system modules are accessible at all levels to user programs via exported declarations e security is provided with user login password and multi level file sys tem security features e the operating system is mature and well documented e replaceable outer level command interpreter which includes support for command files 209 210 CHAPTER 42 POS PERQ OPERATING SYSTEM e The POS system s intermediate level instructions are in Q code e The main program for POS is called SYSTEM This loads and trans fers control to valid user programs 42 1 POS Memory Organisation This refers to the way the POS operating system organises the storage of programs and data in memory Real memory maximum is 2 Mb The system has a virtual store with an address range of 4096 Mega bytes Segment The virtual store is divided into segments which are multiples of 512 bytes an
157. n laser printer The OSLAN connection circuits on the OIO board e drive the physical interface to the OSLAN transciever hardware through the PERQ2 OSLAN B connector e provide data encapsulation and link management functions implement ing part of the data link layer in conjunction with the CPU and I O boards e provide a channel controller interface at the memory and I O data highways These circuits are functionally the same as those on the EIO board which provide the PERQ2 OSLAN A connection 142 CHAPTER 27 PERQ I O RS 232 GPIB SPEECH ETC 27 6 Perq RS 232 27 6 1 PERQI1 full duplex high speed serial data port supports asynchronous bisynchronous and SDLC HDLC ADCCP pro tocols at up to 56K bits per second all line and protocol parameters are programmable modem control is standard PERQ includes a single full bit stream at up to 9600 baud Note this ad mentions nothing about the 56K bits per second like the other did 27 6 2 LN3000 two RS232C interfaces full duplex synchronous asynchronous serial data ports speeds up to 9600 bps Speed up to 19 200 bps using serial port A Speed up to 9 600 bps using serial port B note that it doesn t work very well at 9 600 bps howver For example if using PERQ as a terminal at 9600 some characters will be lost occasionally but if using a communications protocol such as Kermit to transfer files at 9 600 bps there appers to be no problem except for a few occ
158. n levels 2 to 18 though levels beyond that are also supported awaiting VMS to PERQ conversion and the installation of spell pas dictionary kingdom pas a boring game in which you have to decide how much grain and land to store or invest in food and harvesting awaiting VMS to PERQ conversion mroff pas Malcolm s runoff A pre processor to any text formatter that is either based on RUNOFF or which can be restricted to behave like it e g as a front end to enhance basic RUNOFF programs to having something approaching the power of nroff or de enhancing programs like TeX to behave as a nroff type formatter but awaiting SUN to PERQ conversion Chapter 52 PERQ Solar OS Solar was the name of Perq s release of Accent Brian Rosen mailing list Dec 7 1992 T liked the one part in a document about the PERQ s I O as it related to Solar that described the networking as the Solar system as in a universe of interconnected PERQs RDD mailing list Dec 1992 241 242 CHAPTER 52 PERQ SOLAR OS Chapter 53 PERQ Power supply specs and system dimensions etc 53 1 LN3000 Power requirements e 100 115 240 V e Line frequency 50 60 Hz e 880 watts Environment e operating temperature 15 degrees to 32 degrees C e relative humidity 2096 to 8096 Dimensions e base unit 26 high x 15 1 4 wide x 30 deep e portrait display 16 1 2 high x 11 1 2 wide x 14 3 4 deep e landscape display 17 3 4 high x 19 1 2
159. n paid them to say that I called CNN about it but they wouldn t return my call RDD November 1992 Note the above if put in the book should be worded to say something along the lines of from what I recall for legal reasons 73 74 CHAPTER 14 PERQ AND ITS COMPETITION Chapter 15 The alt sys perq Control Message Newsgroups alt sys perq Control newgroup alt sys perq Subject newgroup alt sys perq Approved rdd mystica UUCP Description a newsgroup for the discussion of PERQ graphics workstations This newsgroup was discussed in alt config and there were only positive responses for its creation Please carry this group Attached is a copy of the charter proposal that was posted to alt config Thank you Charter Proposal for alt sys perq The purpose for the proposed newsgroup alt sys perq is for discussions related to PERQ graphic workstations manufactured by PERQ Systems Corp PQS in the United States and under license from PQS by ICL in the United Kingdom PQS was formerly the Three Rivers Computer Corp Pittsburgh PA PERQ graphic workststions were the first em commercial graphic workstations in their class ever produced and have a great deal of historical merit This newsgroup would help the owners of PERQs often known as PERQ 75 76 CHAPTER 15 THE ALT SYS PERQ CONTROL MESSAGE Fanatics to maintain these systems which is becoming a difficult task to say the least
160. n the evolution of the PERQs was the PERQ2 T 1 sys tem This system had a more solid appearance and feel to it as well as a 251 more sturdy cabinet The major changes were the optional 20 landscape display instead of the original protrait display and increased mass storage space and speed Insead of the slow and noisy 14 drives the PERQ2 T 1s could be equipped with up to two Shugart model 8 hard drives for a total of up to 64 Megabytes of mass storage However the cabinet had onkly enough room for one drive so the second drive would have to be placed outside of the processor cabinet Although the storage space had been increased and the data access and transfer times had been improved these drives were less reliable than the drives in the PERQIs The next and last PERQ model to be produced and marketed to the public was the PERQ T 2 Along with a redesigned cabinet the T 2s used smaller faster and more reliable 5 1 4 hard disks which were ST 506 com patible Up to two of these drives could be mounted inside of the processor cabinet for a total of up to 280 Megabytes of mass storage space At this point the size of the writable control store was now up to 16K in size and mein memory could be increased up to two Megabytes Although PERQ had introduced the newer machines the older ones could still be upgraded to a limited extent with the exception of changing the type of hard disks However even this was not impossible
161. nd Etc Miscellaneous excerpts from PERQ advertisements amp Historical Info 7 1 PERQ 1 Human engineering designing systems for the people that use them is evident through the design of PERQ PERQ is designed to live in your office plug into the wall utilize ex isting air conditioning fit in with your furniture and not take up too much of your valuable desk space All of these considerations are part of Three Rivers committment to develop systems for people Maintainability is another important facet of PERQ From its innova tive construction techniques that allow a reparman to replace any module in 15 minutes using only a 2 Phillips screwdrver to its diagnostic display system that tells you what s wrong with your system PERQ shows that maintainability is an integral part of its design concept Note the following example from an ad seems to demonstrate that PERQ systems was clutching at straws unable to clearly target its in tended buyers Much literature tends to aim towards scientists and engineers as users of PERQS however the following excerpt from an advertisement seems to clearly be aiming at the wrong people and trying to make office work appear overly complicated Managers and office workers use PERQs to solve the complex prob lems of the office of the future on one system The PERQ is a word processor a mail system a filing system and a large computer all in one at your desk and it can communicate wi
162. nd some MPOS stuff on a disk which was used for PNX any connection here 2 19 1986 1987 The Perq 3B came into production in 1986 1987 Crossfield did much of the iron work design ADF As originally designed by Perq Systems the Perq 3 needed to have most of its designs of worst case analysis reworked in order to make the manufacture of the system possible The only exception was John Straits RasterOp a display accelerator deemed excellent by Crosfield it was the only card in the system which did not need to have any changes made to it In addition to John Strait s RasterOp many of the Perq 3 s original features were kept Crosfield wanted to use the Perq 3 s for picture processing MegaScan Technolog was started by one of the founders of PERQ Sys tems Brian Rosen Stan Kriz who was was the analog engineer for the PERQ also came to MegaScan which had its offices in the old Perq office in Fairfax VA Stan Kriz and Max Salinas remained in Fairfax while the remains of the Perq group stayed in Pittsburgh Crosfield took over total control of the Perq 3 and MegaScan Technol ogy was no longer involved with the project Soon after troubled times at MegaScan Technologies caused the split off of Rosen amp Co to form Mars Stan Kriz stayed on at MegaScan When MegaScan completed their work on the PERQ 3 project they began work on a TMS34010 based low cost MS frame buffer for the 2 20 1997 27 MegaScan monitor
163. nd which was the starting block sector It may be something like the directory entry is left in the directory but marked as deleted The files are placed on the end of the free list Undelete looks at the directory for the file and fixes it and then looks at the logical block chain to make sure it is still ok The directory structure has the string which is the name and the starting zeroth sector number The actual directory entry has a redundant list of blocks that comprise the file In fact every datum in the file system is replicated in two places in two different structures Scrounge works by scanning all the logical headers putting the chains together recreating the free list and recreatng the directory Brian Rosen mailing list Jan 21 1993 Chapter 43 PERQ Power Supplies PSU The processor power supply provides power for the display unit 55V except for those with an integral psu Kriz type monitors will require 24V in lieu of 55V Try to find out the specifications for the power supplies used for all of the PERQs The PERQ 1 supplies at least the Boscherts have an adjustment screw for calibration you need to apply a simulated load power it up and tweak the screw until you get 5 1 volts nominal though 5 0 5 2 is okay CL May 11 1993 217 218 CHAPTER 43 PERQ POWER SUPPLIES PSU Chapter 44 PERQ Prices PERQI with 256K 12 MB disk as of March 1 1981 27 000 options 10M Bit Eth
164. ndwritten PERQ design notes and diagrams lots of pages of test vectors all written out by hand Just as a point of reference did about five ten years ago sketch out some ideas for a new 32 bit Perg CPU and I O system built around the original 16 bit microcoded design think their basic CPU architecture was solid and potentially scalable obviously they took one step to 24 bits but think the 32 bit design was a bigger jump and would have been a real hummer Basically think they were onto a RISC like path before any nothion of RISC was really being discussed My ideas not being a hardware guy at all mind you were for a chip or chipset with multiple functional units running in parallel with a very large bank of registers like the 256 in the original PERQ and large secondary cache and a very intelligent memory dma controller for better I O throughput think the one thing was really intrigued about was a RasterOp chip that worked with the memory controller so that it could asynchronously do RasterOps in memory or to and from or within a dedicated frame buffer and never have to worry about memory access collisions or refresh delays And of couse for color machines advocated a planar approach where you d have one rasterop chip for each bit plane in memory and would for simple moves run them all simultaneously some really neat tricks could come of that Like selectable window depths overlay planes Z buff
165. ne off pulled the Pull to cheat switch and hit the button Something orange and glowing shot out of the card cage The system booted and worked file Later upon examination of the CPU board a bunch of capacitors right around the microsequencer were scorched and burnt One of them in a fit or heroism to save the fuses had met its fiery demise Say what you will but the Perq is built like a tank It just keeps rollin CL Nov 4 1992 21 48 13 Exploding PERQ 1 Motor Start Capacitors This has only been reported as happenning with PERQs running off of 220VAC 48 14 Slipping Drive Belts PERQ 1 hard drive belts have been known to slip off Chapter 49 S E R C The SERC Science and Engineering Research Council was is one of the biggest users of computing resources in the U K Had anticipated a transformation in computing methods single user systems SUS and distributed computing networks etc by developing a coordinating plan the SERC Common Base Policy which is aimed at avoid ing wasteful duplication of effort in the development of basic software for single user systems and providing the hardware and software technology to enable an efficient utilization of such resources The SERC s plan envisaged that by 1983 SERC would have over 200 PERQs distributed throughout the UK at universities and SERC laborato ries and that these systems would be linked to each other and to existing facilities b
166. nfrequent CPU parameter updates are needed 19 2 Video Signals Data read from the memory array in resonse to display and cursor addresses is serialised and transmitted to the display unit Horizontal and vertical synchronisation signals are also provided by the display logic timing circuits 19 3 PERQ1 Display e high resolution 768 point by 1024 line display e bit mapped in memory e displays a raster scanned image e 15 portrait display approx 8 1 2 by 11 e size of A4 paper e non interlaced display all 1024 lines are refreshed 60 times per second to provide a flicker free high resolution display e the display bit map occupies a part of main memory and special hard ware and microcode in the processor facilitate rapid manipulation of the image 19 4 PERQ2 DISPLAY 105 e for text charactes are painted into the bit map from a software defined font which can be any size shape or complexity e multiple fonts are supported as well as proportionally spaced charac ters to give the screen typeset quality e uses P104 phosphor e makes use of 64 bit parallel RasterOp hardware The all or some of PERQ 1 A displays for PERQs in the U K have the following information on a tag inside them Video Monitors Inc model no M1000A Customer International Com puters Ltd 19 4 PERQ2 Display e free standing raster scanned bit mapped CRT e 60 Hz non interlaced refresh rate e 100 dots inch resolution e P4 white tube
167. now that PQS in no longer in business to support these systems Additionally the company that was set up to support these systems by PQS Accent Systems is also no longer in business Needless to say the survival of the remaining PERQs may very well depend upon the creation of such a newsgroup Many of the known present owners of PERQs have the goal of preserving these machines in working order for as long as possible PERQ owners would benefit greatly by having a newsgroup devoted to the PERQs which would provide an informal forum for the discussion of PERQs This would be a place where they can exchange help and advice technical information operating hints etc about the PERQs and exchange stories and anecdotes on the use history and future of PERQ graphic workstations etc We feel that we need a newsgroup for reasons which include the following The PERQ owners PERQ Fanatics have been organized as a mailing list for some time and regularly exchange ideas and information regarding PERQs It is estimated that only about one percent of the current PERQs in use today are targeted by this mailing list Not only would such a newsgroup provide current PERQ users ready access to help and advice from other current PER users but it would also provide help and information from the vast pool of past PERQ users We have discovered that many former users of PERQs have retained an interest in these fascinating historic machines and
168. nown TOPS 20 EMACS editor PERQ Al is part of PERQ Systems Corp LINQ line of advanced high performance workstations what were the others in this line weren t they also basically the same T2s 152 CHAPTER 30 PERQ LISP AI Chapter 31 PERQ 3410 series Multibus Laser Option board e provides the PERQ workstion with the ability to connect to Multibus compatible devices as well as to streaming cartridge tapes and to a laser printer e Access to these devices through the PERQ workstation is fully sup ported under the Accent operating system e Any properly equipped device on the network can have access to M LO supported devices connected to the PERQ M LO PCB printed circuit board e The M LO PCB can be ordered in three configurations to support Multibus and streaming tape to support a laser printer to support Multibus streamer and laser printer e One multibus controller can be integrated into the PERQ card cage e Expansion cabinets are available each capable of housing up to 14 Multibus compatible controllers e SMD disk controllers and disk drives and Pertec 9 track tape con trollers and tape drives are also available 153 154CHAPTER 31 PERQ 3410 SERIES MULTIBUS LASER OPTION BOARD e Full function Multibus adapter conforming to the IEEE 796 standard e features a 24 bit address bus with either 8 or 16 bit data paths e One device on the bus is the current master which controls the bu
169. nserted a duplicate Run floppy and forgetting that it was a file system floppy issued a fl dir com mand An empty floppy directory listing appeared and showed 900 blocks to be free When I remembered that this was a file system floppy I mounted the floppy and used the directory command all of the files were still there Note that this was a double density floppy was it previously formatted as an RT 11 floppy Brian Rosen responded to my discovery When the Perq was first invented the computer we had to do soft ware development on was a PDP 11 So the first floppy disks POS could read were RT 11 floppy disks written by the PDP 11 As recall we made the first few blocks of a file system formatted floppy have a header that looked like an RT 11 floppy so we could write POS floppies on the PDP 11 or PDP 11 floppies on POS I believe that you cannot have files in POS format and in RT 11 format on the same disk only the first few disk blocks have some commonality BR mailing list Feb 12 1993 Sometimes a PERQ s floppy drive doesn t seek the disk heads to home before attempting to mount a floppy PNX will report failed to open dev flop or fd not found Here s a solution to this problem from Jamie L Jones August 13 1993 My disk drive wasn t seeking the disk heads to home before at tempting to mount the disk it would try to mount it format 18 4 PERQ2 T1 8 35 MEG MICROPOLIS 1200 HARD DISK 95 i
170. nt No 4 August 2 1985 Changes to the Languages Manual files rellng pro doc rellng pro addendum to Pepper documentation file addendum doc Autologic Development Design Document PERQ Interface Design by Sandeep Johar May 7 1982 forst draft IBM to PERQ via Ethernet software 15 pages BadMap V1 0x Documentation customer released version of BadSec tor file badmap doc burn in documentation very brief file burnin doc Business PERQs Up for City Computer Builder A Butler Process for Resource Sharing on SPICE Machines C interactions with Accent network server file cinter C Version 2 0 May 31 1985 Release Notes for Accent files c2rel pro doc c2rel pro 3Prose C Version 2 0 Amendment No 1 July 16 1985 Release Notes for Accent files c2amd1 pro doc c2amd1 pro 3Prose Cache Control Logic file cache v1 doc Canon printer docs for Accent including print server info Canon CX software info some of it is not true file read me PERQ Color Display Manual February 28 1985 for use with Color Display Software Version C500 1 and the PERQ Color 500 display system files color5 pro doc color5 pro 3Prose 111 Computer Firm Leaves Basement Origins Behind 3RCC A Controlled Window Management Environment for the PERQ David Barnes Software Tools Centre U K C Cursor Design A PERQ Cursor Builder file cursdesign doc Daemon
171. nt product development marketing and manufacturing activities These relationships have contributed to the acceleration of PERQ Systems product planning and development efforts PERQs were shipped with a bootable copy of the most recent POS op erating system were later models shipped with both POS and Accent Where marketed and sold by ICL before the 3RCC name change the PERQ was called the ICL Three Rivers PERQ Blurbs from the ICL PERQ T2 Service Guide The system satisfies the needs of scientists and engineers whose work re quires a combination of dedicated processing power and interactive graphics facilities The product is subject to continuous development and additional facil ities will be introduced from time to time 56 CHAPTER 7 ADVERTS AND ETC Chapter 8 Advent Systems Note Prolog Software s Picasso program was copied from Advent System s Paint software 57 58 CHAPTER 8 ADVENT SYSTEMS Chapter 9 Autologic Development The Autologic Design Document references the following DARPA Internet documents e Assigned numbers RFC 790 J Postel Sept 1981 ASSIGN e Internet Protocol Specifications RFC 791 Sept 1981 IP 3RCC developed a reliable flow controlled protocol for Autologic called MESSAGESYSTEM BOX the hardware configuration to be supplied by Auscom tp support MES SAGE SERVER the total software package in the AUSCOM box 59 60 CHAPTER 9 AUTOLOGIC DEVELOPM
172. o TLates and the JCS are indivisible but the forst TLate can take a segment fault of necessary Note that the E Stack achieves its maximum depth From FindString pas Note a POS carriage return is printed as chr 215 chr 212 From helper pas CR FF Chr 015 Chr 014 From login pas When asking for user password Enter the secret password for user username From makeboot pas 283 file types in file information block type 15 boot type 16 mboot Note from userpass pas Passwords get encrypted yet still not much security Try this check to see of user guest can be removed From allocdisk pas When allocating pages the module updates the PartInfoBlock every MaxAllocs calls on AllocDisk Since the system may crash sometime between updates the pointers and free list may not be accurate From diskdefs pas Legal unit numbers tp the microcode are 4 bit quantities This allows selection of sixteen drives Units 0 through 15 From diskio pas Eventually diskio will be removed from the system and higher level Software will need to be modified to use VolumeSystem directly in particular this will be required to support more than a single hard disk and single floppy This is an implementation of the DiskIO interface which uses the new VolumeSystem module
173. obably an enhancement for the I O board to cache disk reads and writes since the system itself doesn t do it Accent does do some disk caching I believe if you turn on lazydisk CL mailing list Nov 13 1992 42 13 QCode intermediate code for POS QCode is the native instruction set Pascal and Fortran are compiled into QCode The QCode interpreter written in microassembler fetches Q Codes and executes them Brian Rosen mailing list Dec 7 1992 When asked by Malcolm Into which of these two levels to the Qcodes fit The assembler of most computer systems Brian Rosen mailing list Dec 7 1992 When Malcolm asked I am also perplexed as to why no one appears to know of the existance of a native code assembler for the PERQ 1A Surely someone somewhere must have written one once Oh yes there is most definitely an assembler and a debugger but that needed two Perq s and a set of boards that allowed on a Perq running the debugger to control the other Brian Rosen mailing list Dec 7 1992 More on this QCode is a descendent of PCode which was invented by the USCD people as the way USCD Pascal worked The compiler generates PCodes To port USCD Pascal to another machine you write a new PCode 42 14 UNDELETING FILES AND SCROUNGE 215 interpreter On most systems PCode is written in assembler for the native instruction set On a Perg the PCode is written in microcode No
174. ocoded computers are horizontal machines Vertical microcoded machines are rare Perq programs often did exactly what you described above they added a few instructions to the instruction set There is a call in the OS to load microcode and a way to invoke this code Generally you add a new opcode to the main opcode dispatch case loop which has an entry point in your new microcode The inline assembler directive in Perq Pascal could insert your new opcode when you wanted to call it We worked hard to make the opcode dispatch loop as small as possible so that instruction set emulation was as fast as possible The way it worked was there is an 8 byte opcode cache OP that had an autoincrementing counter BPC that addressed it One of the codings of the branch control field is JMP BPC OP I ve probably got the field names wrong This clause said Look to see if BPC is overflowed if so branch to the opcode refill code If not get the byte out of the OP cache that is pointed to by BPC Branch to one of 256 locations depending on the value of the byte this is the instruction dispatch itself Increment BPC At the end of every microcode fragment the implements a QCode this clause appears on the Branch field The net result is that if there was a byte remaining in the OP file there is a zero instruc tion overhead for dispatch the first microinstruction of the next QCode is executed in they cycle immediately following the last
175. ogram could Conflict the above was from the RAL SERC paper but according to a newspaper article by William H Wylie CMU was the first customer However a third source Comp Graphics amp Apps cites that the first order came from RAL 20 CHAPTER 2 HISTORY attempt to use memory addresses which don t belong to it it did cave the drawback of causing Accent to run slower MIT Researchers were working on two systems which used the concepts of the Alto using very different technology This first was known as the Lisp Machine project the MIT Lisp Machine had all the features associated with a workstation but was much more expensive There were two spinoffs of this project which were less costly lisp machines produced by Symbolics and LMI The other MIT project which evolved from knowlege of the Alto was the Nu machine this was to be a workstation using a Motorolla 68000 microprocessor as its CPU In various attempts to turn the Nu machine into a commercially viable product MIT teamed up with Exxon Enterprises then Heath Schlumberger and then Western Digital All of these attempts failed The only thing that resulted from this was a deal between MIT and Western Digital in which Western Digital was to make a Lisp processor board which would plug into the bus of the Nu machine After some officials from Prime Computer took a tour of MIT and saw the Nu machine Lisp Machine and the Alto it is runmored that the idea for the Apollo wor
176. omething useful like the contents of its internal data structures being built up in mem ory as it did its processing or something like that But if you look at the source code it s just eye candy It s just to give you something to look at and know it s working Parts of that display really are a glimpses of memory being updated as the program runs a display hack unmatched on any work station I ve ever seen but the regular striped pattern is faked More proof of this look at scavenger animate with the CursDesign program CL Nov 6 1992 214 CHAPTER 42 POS PERQ OPERATING SYSTEM 42 11 Scrounge not reporting uncaught exceptions I once had a machine that never reported uncaught exceptione ANY error in a program caused it to crash The problem turned out to be that scrounge seg was corrupted and so when any program would die and the system tried to invoke Scrounge that was it blammo I reloaded that one seg file did a makeboot and then relinked everything on the system fun fun Things are fine now CL Nov 6 1992 42 12 Shell The real problem with POS is that the shell doesn t remain in memory when you invoke a program the shell has to be reloaded after every user program exits If the system kept the shell memory resident while user programs run it would probably be much quicker One of the hardware enhancements 3RCC planned was a cache pager unit of some sort pr
177. on August 12 1993 the following message was sent to those who resubscribed I couldn t resist adding the lyrics The PERQ Fanatics mailing list Created at this site 12th August 1993 Think of the song Hello Hooray by Alice Cooper Hello Hooray Yes This List s Begun Yes We re Ready Hoping that this audience does still like PERQs Loving every Raster p every frustrated scream We ve been waiting so long for this list to come Greetings from PERQ Fanatics Headquarters This message comes to you as part of a secret not too diabolical mission in which the goal is 61 3 NEW MAILING LIST RE LAUNCHED 265 to get as many past and present PERQ users to subscribe to a mailing list about the PERQs as possible This mailing list is a replacement for the previous PERQ Fanatics mailing list that was maintained by Chris Lamb and is archived automatically To receive archive files each file contains one calendar month s worth of messages simply mail perq fanatics owner with your request stating which month s you require This facility will hopefully be automated in the future Full instructions will be given at such a time Presently membership of this list is unmoderated and subscription as well as unsubscription is currently automatic If you don t wish to remain a subscriber to this list simply send the message SIGNOFF to perq fanatics request We look forware to seeing you posting to the li
178. on Base Policy among which Ethernet and the Cambridge Ring were the most widely used move this to SERC file Nodes are connected in a closed loop Transmission is based on a system of circulating slots A node can load data which includes a destination address into an empty slot and the data is removed by the destination station A guaranteed transmission rate is obtained by prohibiting a node from using two consecutive slots Chosen as the SERC Common Base Policy standard because of technical advantages and because systems were available from U K industry almost two years before an Ethernet product became available Over 20 Cambridge Ring LANs were installed in UK universities as of April 1983 and a large body of experience and software was available In order to provide PERQ ring communications within a short period of time the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory developed an interface which allows the ring to be accessed via the IEEE 488 or GPIB bus The interface to the GPIB is designed to match the 50 way encoded interface and presents the station as a number of number of status and data registers The RAL interface translates this node image as a single pri mary GPIB address with each register having a separate secondary address The design has been optimized to allow bulk transfers in one direction to take place with the minimum number of GPIB cycles so that the ring can potentially be driven at full speed In terms of the
179. on sets dynamically based on the language of the running process Because of optimiztion and co residency programs written in any of the languages inherently run more efficiently as do multi language applications systems 5 6 Other Info According to PERQ Systems President Aaron Coleman Accent can be ported to other vendors computers making this a highly versatile system prior to it becoming Mach was this ever done Accent was designed to maximize the overall efficiency of a heterogenious network of workstations with varying capabilities as well as independent storage and I O subsystems Accent was a mature fully documented and operational on several hun dred workstations in production environments Research continued at Carnegie Mellon nnnniversity while PERQ Sys tems held responsibility for further Accent development and support Accent is an open non proprietary system Source code was available and PERQ Systems would support a vendor wishing to port Accent to any appropriate hardware did this occur on what systems how was appropriate hardware defined 5 7 Accent and Printing Publishing Accent is ideally suited for Computer Aided printing and Publishing because it supports e highly interactive graphics on raster displays under the control of an innovative window manager e very large programs using demand paged virtual memory techniques e 1 O systems which can support sustained high speed data transfers for
180. opcode operand operand file OP file operand register OP register operand selection OP file operand file OP register operand register processor shift output push down stack Q code R result R bus result bus RAM random access memory 131 random access memory RAM random access store see random access memory RasterOp RasterOp operator readable victim latch real address refresh dynamic array memory refresh display scren result result bus R bus shift matrix source operand register start address of microcode that executes an intermediate code system establishment the boot process UState microstate register victim latch virtual address WCS writable control store writable control store WCS X field of a microinstruction X port outputs of ALU XY registers Y field of a microinstruction Y port outputs of ALU 132 CHAPTER 24 GLOSSARY OF PERQ CPU TERMINOLOGY Chapter 25 PERQ GPIB PERQI PERQ provides a full IEEE 488 1975 standard implementation of the General Purpose Instrumentation Bus The GPIB provides a simple compatible way of interfacing a wide range of medium speed peripherals as well as laboratory facilities production test equipment and instrumentation A 9914 intelligent GPIB controller chip and transceivers handle all the interface control and data transfers The controller is programmed by the Z80 CPU and has direct access to the Z80 memory f
181. or data byte transfers e The PERQ 1 GPIB is rated at 170 K Baud e The PERQ 2 GPIB is rated at 30 K Baud 133 134 CHAPTER 25 PERQ GPIB Chapter 26 PERQ Graphics Graphics primitives are extremely fast RasterOp moves arbitrary bit rectangles Operates at about 31 000 000 pixels per second Line drawing operates at 475 000 pixels per second Text display at about 16 030 characters per second which is equivalent to 160 K Baud RasterOp hardware provides eight ways to combine images All run at full speed 1 2 Replace for moving Compliment for inverting AND for masking AND not NAND for erasing OR for combining OR not NOR for coloring XOR for temporary updates or setting to white XNOR for inverted temporary updates or setting to black 135 136 CHAPTER 26 PERQ GRAPHICS RasterOp will operate on buffers anywhere in main memory This allows many fonts to be used at the same time Pictures can be generated off screen to avoid flicker the user doesn t see the immediate image Real time animation and smooth movement are easy to accomplish Pop up menus and pop up windows can restore the original screen pic ture when removed 26 1 PERQ Related Graphics Files In the Poskanzer Bitmap Collection FTP able from lth se and other FTP sites there is a bitmap file named perq This file is in Sun raster format and the picture is mirrored spheres displaying the word PERQ I suspect tha
182. ortant valve machine Pegasus made by Ferranti Ltd from 1956 on Not yet on display in the Museum _Manchester Group Pegasus WP_ Newly formed working party operating at the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry to conserve but perhaps not restore to working order their early Pegasus recently discovered _Elliott 803 WP_ Small but active have restored and maintain the Museum s Elliott 803 which was an early transistor machine _DEC WP_ Active maintains the Museum s several sorts of PDP8 and a PDP12 _S100 Bus WP_ Active masses of Altairs North Star Horizons etc _Totalisator WP_ Suspended awaiting space and expertise Yes it is considered that the electro mechanical dog track totalisators from the late 1920 s are large scale multi terminal real time computers The Museum has three I believe in storage at the moment _Software and Emulation WP_ Not active but a lot of work on emulation see below Working parties work on Museum objects under very strict curatorial rules and procedures Because they can only meet infrequently progress is at a much slower pace than in say industry or academia ARCHIVING The CCS has a good relationship with the National Archive for the History of Computing based in Manchester with loosely separate spheres of interest 68 CHAPTER 12 COMPUTER CONSERVATION SOCIETY There is a large and growing collection of manuals manuscripts sales literature and so on from
183. ot SCSI QIC 02 is a newer smarter interface and is used by many PC tape drives 18 13 Adding a Second Hard Disc Double Disc Setup this cable has 3 connectors unshown is connection to disc 1 Disc 1 with Disc interface board attached shown 18 13 ADDING A SECOND HARD DISC 101 second position JD to disc 1 Drive Select in 20 pin first position JE RO a aie ia a eere a i Disc 2 Drive Select in 20 pin Daisy chain cable This is a flat straight through conected cable doesn t get twisted like the daisy chain cable for PC s For example if ribbon cable is laid flat out and one socket has the connectors showing the others will also If one socket is face down they will all be face down with no pin connectors showing Notes 1 Only one controller disc interface board is needed for two drives 2 POS will only recognise the first drive except for the POS utilities which are used for disc formatting etc The first drive or only drive in a PERQ should be jumpered as the first drive either a 1 or a 0 depending upon manufacturer s notation and the second drive should be jumpered as the next one 3 Remember that if using a drive that is not in the disk params file and you add it to this file do not place it in th
184. ototypes were to be procured Assigned to Ed Maples Determine if any changes to backplane are necessary to support landscape Assigned to Tim Taylor Check wiring of connectors for EIO to backplane Jeff Howell Design and modify Z80 test code and PROM Assigned to Dirk Kalp and Bill Hulley Document kludge display cable assembly for production Ken Young 49 50 CHAPTER 6 THE ACTION LIST Build I O kludge cables for Jan K1 machines Andy Verostic Note Andy Verostic was later at Megascan Document production cable from vendor MOLDCON Ken Young Design PAL on backplane using a VAX program Brian Rosen Design fixture for setting time of day clock and write program to set clock with fixture Bill Hulley note this must be the device and software mentioned in the ICL T2 Service Guide Design appropriate insulation and handling procedures for TOD clock Dale at ICL Determine most appropriate fix for the filter frame that is visible through front grill Ken Young Prevent puncture of Ige connectors determine most apropriate fix shorter tails amp insulator and document it Joe Schmidt ICL Mounting on 55 supply to be improved Design better mount ing arrangement Ken Young Paint plenium of Jan and Feb frames in house Bob Tysarczyk Run thermal tests on entire unit esp CPU Geoff Potter Lay out labels Jim Taylor Japan floppy voltage will floppy withstand 100V 10V Yes Geoff Po
185. pdm pas This is a hack since the compiler can t handle string constants of length 1 Hack lt lt Hack 0 chr 1 The PDP 11 version of PrqMic was done away with on Sept 28 1981 permic pas Apparently the RSX 11M 0 5 one PDP 11 was used to create microcode listings in 1980 POS streams package uses RSX as an output device however this is optional depending on compiler switch settings for conditional compilation A file to the RSX11 M 05 is opened through the RS 232 port 275 Limited multitasking sort of in POS is accomplished via the FullLn function in stream pas This function is provided in order that a program may continue to do other things while waiting for keyboard input Warnings from stream pas WARNING It is VERY dangerous to have transcripting on while running the Scavenger or any similar program No checking is done to insure that this is not done Caveat EMptor WARNING Also it is dangerous to run Typefile while transcripting is on The data typed out will be wrong since TypeFile uses ReadDisk and the PERQ may crash WARNING From the system pas change log May 13 1981 JPS remove vestiges of old system standard error procedures April 6 1981 JPS Retrofit changes for exceptions to version of system that diverged after March 15 1981 Change main version from C to D March 15 1981 JPS Put in stuff
186. phosphor e hardware cursor user definable up to 56 x 64 pixels e direct refresh from main memory e portrait screen 768 x 1024 pixels 15 diagonal e landscape screen 1280 x 1024 pixels 20 diagonal e display 1 3 million pixels e a different document indicated that the landscape display is 19 not 20 Were there two different sized landscape displays The other specifications for the display are the same 106 CHAPTER 19 PERQ DISPLAY 19 5 Color display Information about the display for the ColorPerq 8 bits pixel 256 color map entry format screen 1280 pixels x 1024 lines Hitachi 19 color monitor model 3619 Just after booting the display contained a wild looking purple and yellow picture Robert Colwell also a slide of this Another document mantions a different color display 1024 x 768 pixels 30 HZ interlaced landscape display Dataquest document Was to be a low cost system and for this this reason an expensive monitor was rejected When the color option was to be used all memory would reside in the cabinet for the color hardware this is because this much memory would not fit into the current PERQ cabinet It was decided to provide the full compliment of memory that a PERQ is equipped to address 1 MWord 2 Megabytes using 256 16K RAMs plus 16 64K RAMs for parity With 256 RAMs 32 bytes during a single memory cycle could be looked up an aggregate memory bandwidth of 753 MBytes second
187. r machines Hard disk selected Which char to boot from b System b boot disk address nn 199 Interpreter b boot is unused System or Interpreter I press return Interpreter b boot disk address nn Existing boot file press return In the above example one question required you to answer it according to the type of machine used The table below explains what replies to use PERQ Type Answer PERQ 1 Accent PERQ1a MBoot PERQ 2 Accent PERQ2 MBoot PERQ T1 Accent PERQ2 MBoot PERQ T2 Accent T2 MBoot Using BindBoot Under Accent for Accent This is pretty self explanatory run the program and you ll see If further explanation is needed let me know and I ll add it In order to create a bootable partition for Accent that is outside of the range of POS it is necessary to use this program Avoiding Unusable Undeletable files under Accent 1 When installing Accent for the first time install it from within a partition that is fully accessible from POS 2 Run scavenger on the partition before installing the Accent files 3 Install the Accent files and make partition bootable with BindBoot 4 Create a new partition that is outside of the POS accessible boundaries 5 Boot Accent 200 CHAPTER 39 PERQ KEEPER S GUIDE 6 Run Scavenger from Accent on the new partition You may now use this new Accent partition and make it bootable if you wish deleting the other Accent partition that was accessible fro
188. ransfers initiated by the peripheral result in quad word transfers of data with the memory board 32 2 1 PERQ1 a minimum of 256 kilobytes of main memory 680 ns average cycle time 1 megabyte RAM option will be available features virtual addressing scheme with segmentation swapping and large address space 32 bit address space a parity option is available for the RAM To support the wide bandwidth requirements of the CPU display disk and network the PERQ memory system is designed for a 200 megabit per second aggregate memory bandwidth The memory plane is organized as 64K of 64 bit wide words Memory cycles are split between the display and the rest of the system with 5096 of the bandwidth available to the display The display controller is completey integrated into the memory con troller resulting in a compact low cost design The memory connects to the CPU and the IO channel controller with a 3 bus design Address Data In Data Out which can transfer 16 bits every 680 ns 32 2 PERQ2 T2 LN3000 1 to 2 Mbytes of MOS semiconductor RAM with parity checking memory cycles 64 bits every 680 ns approximately 200 Mbits sec aggregate memory bandwidth shared equally between display and processor 158 CHAPTER 32 PERQ MEMORY SYSTEM e integrated memory display controller e screen bit mapped directly from any area of memory One to two Mbytes of MOS RAM with parity checking no longer an option Chapter 33 PE
189. rocess to allow the fixed disk to come up to speed This is 30 seconds for the Micropolis 8 on a PERQ 1 185 PERQ1 and PERQ2 with 14 and 8 hard disks The PERQI 14 disk and PERQ2 8 disk systems will boot from the hard disks when all of the following conditions have been met 96 CHAPTER 18 PERQ MASS STORAGE DISK amp TAPE e Disk drive is up to speed e PLO clock has locked to servo track e Two minutes have elapsed since power up e The drive has been selected The following paragraph is from the PERQ Disk Control document The control bus structures of the A4000 and the M1200 are sufficiently different that they cannot be directly substituted for one another Yet they are enough alike that a simple adapter cir cuit will allow with the proper software support the M1200 type of drive to be used on an SA4000 controller Such an adapter has been built The adapter converts the eight bit control bus of the M1200 to a bus that is physically compatible with the SA4000 control bus 18 6 PERQ T 2 5 1 4 hard disk drives brands models e 5 1 4 Winchester disks e 1 disk standard 2nd integral disk optional e 43 288 Mbytes capacity Note Accent only POS limit approx 32 MB e rotational speed 3600 rpm e average access time 30 ms e transfer rate 5 Mbits sec e average latency 8 33 ms Micropolis 300 series 5 1 4 disk drives e Takes about 30 seconds for the drive to come up to speed e track to tr
190. ronment for the PERQ LN 3000 series systems Maxpro was designed to integrate applications for decision support com puter aided engineering computer aided drafting computer aided manufac turing and text processing through a common front end user interface Software available either separately or bundled together including an image scanning package WYSIW YG word processing system a drawing program for CAE CAD applications a free hand sketching program and spreadsheet package Text and illustrations could be combined into a single document using an interactive word processor or optional batch document composition system Mint for output on the Canon CX laser printer Was MasPro related to IDOCS Selected MaxPro packages were available for hardware including Apollo and DEC MicroVAX Address of Accent at the time that MaxPro was being marketed 5907 Penn Avenue Pittsburgh PA 15206 Phone number then was 1 412 361 3200 31 32 CHAPTER 3 ACCENT SYSTEMS CORP President then was Richard Cox Chapter 4 More PERQ History Three Rivers computer Corporation produced several types of computer electronic equipment besides the PERQ computers including e High performance calligraphic vector display processors e Color raster display equipment e Management information presentation systems featuring color graph ics e Special purpose memory systems e High Fidelity Audio A D and D A conversion systems Brian Rosen s reply
191. roup of the British Computer Society and was Started about four years ago after an approach from the Curator of Computing at the National Science Museum in London He is responsible for the care for ever of machines in the collection but with little in house expertise available as to how to care for them and he was often approached by old timers offering their skills The original idea of the CCS was to try to bring these together in an organised way For the 65 66 CHAPTER 12 COMPUTER CONSERVATION SOCIETY first three years the Science Museum took on a BCS officer to manage the Information Age project and he was allowed time and facilities to also act as Secretary to the CCS thus ensuring it got off to a stable and solid start Although he no longer works for the Museum he is still the Secretary working from home Broadly the objectives are Promote the conservation of historic computers Develop awareness of the importance of historic computers Encourage research on seminal historic computers Hardware software and user applications are all included in the remit So far as I know there is no equivalent in the UK to the Charles Babbage Institute in the USA though there are academic departments e g at the University of Warwick with an interest in the history The CCS thus provides a focus for these activities What counts as historic As a rule of thumb we would say it should be at least twenty years old but th
192. rox Network Systems XNS Protocol Package V1 0 Release Notes Ammendment 1 files xnsamd pro doc xnsamd pro 3Prose Z80 cross assembler docs file z80 prose 118 CHAPTER 20 PERQ DOCUMENTS CATALOGED THUS FAR Chapter 21 PERQ File System Each disk partition must be fewer than 32 768 blocks Each block is 256 words 512 bytes Recommended partition size is 10 080 or fewer blocks so that the Scav enger utility can handle the partition in one pass 119 120 CHAPTER 21 PERQ FILE SYSTEM Chapter 22 PERQ Finance This chapter refers to the PERQ financial documents which haven t been included in this document yet 121 122 CHAPTER 22 PERQ FINANCE Chapter 23 Floating Point Unit This unit is not used by the software and the components are only fitted on early boards The EIO board can hold a 8087 numeric data procesing chip with control and interfacing circuits This sub system communicates only with the PERQ CPU through the I O data bus The PERQ CPU can load instructions to a queue in the FPU and ex amines it s status register for indication that results are ready for retreival Note the floating point clock speech and timer were not supported at first release what first release 123 124 CHAPTER 23 FLOATING POINT UNIT Chapter 24 Glossary of PERQ CPU Terminology e A side of ALU e address space e ALU See arithmetic logic unit e AMux e arithmetic logic unit ALU The PERQ s ALU is
193. ry large virtual address space of 4 GBytes Contains the display s bit map The dynamic RAM array is organized for the parallel access of 1 2 or 4 16 bit words in each memory cycle One 680 nS memory cycle is equal to four 170 ns CPU micro instruction beats Access to sequential row addresses to refresh the display screen means that no specific refresh mechanism is required for the dynamic array Memory is addresses when the CPU or I O boards present a word ad dress on the 20 bit memory address highway This address is buffered on the memory board Memory may not be accesses by I O devices when the hold bit of a microinstruction is set Address inputs may be modified when the hold bit is set in conjunction with the jump field The memory printed circuit boards provide the basic random access store drivers buffers and control and also holds the logic circuits generating the visual display signals The random access memory RAM array is organised for the parallel access of 1 2 or 4 16 bit words in one 680 mS memory cycle which is four CPU micro instruction beats The CPU or I O boards present a word address on the 20 bit memory address highway This is buffered on the memory board and used to generate bank column and row selection and the two phase 8 bit chip addresses Different board types are used for systems with portrait and landscape displays 155 156 CHAPTER 32 PERQ MEMORY SYSTEM The memory board contains e ba
194. s 48 6 CAUTION T1 PROCESSOR MOVEMENT Be very careful not to jar the processor cabinet when the 35 Mb disk drive heads are unlocked On 1 systems the shipping latch should be locked if the cabinet is to be moved If this is not possible for final positioning under a table or against a wall great care is needed to avoid damage T2 systems using the Micropolis 1300 series hard disks have their heads parked automatically 48 7 CPU Board PROMS Disk Drive Types Although the same EIO boards can be used for both 5 1 4 and 8 hard disks by changing a few jumpers the CPU boards require different PROMS when different size hard disks are used 5 1 4 vs 8 48 8 PERQ 1 System Warm Up Some PERQ 1 systems need to warm up for a period of several minutes to several hours to let component temperatures stabilize If not warmed up disk read errors and uncaught exceptions will arise when booting or during other disk accesses 48 9 UNDELETABLE FILES 229 48 9 Undeletable Files What to do about seemingly undeletable files There are two ways to deal with this problem which occurs under POS and Accent Apparently the problem is a result of a bug in the Accent Kernel since the following was found in the source code to Scavenger for Accent Revision note for version 0 9 of Accent Scavenger The kernel can t deal with Bad segments at all it refuses to read write delete etc so we make the bad segment be a permanent segmen
195. s Other devices contend to become masters if they wish to control a transfer directly rather than relinquishing control to the workstation housing the Multibus Adapter e Multibus allows multile CPUs on one bus The PERQ CPU may serve as Multibus master and initiate I O or memory transfers e DMA transfers to from memory for DMA transfers PERQ microcode initializes a PERQ DMA channel to accept transfers from a mapped portion of Multibus address space e Multibus initiated DMA requests to the mapped portion of address space will be accepted by the M LO PCB as a slave and and be routed through the standard PERQ DMA channel to PERQ mem ory Interrupt requests on the Multibus will be fielded by the M LO PCB and cause a PERQ interrupt The Multibus interrupt vector will be passed to the interrupt service microcode to notify the appropriate PERQ device driver e Multibus interrupts mapped to PERQ interrupt system see above e The Multibus adapter supports both byte and word transfers at any Multibus address with the PERQ as master Full 24 bit memory and 16 bit I O addresses are supported Both byte and word transfers may be made to or from PERQ memory as a slave Fight maskable nonvectored interrupts are encoded by priority and asserted on a single PERQ hardware line Note from CL because the PERQ CPU acts as the Multibus master it placed to heavy a load on the CPU and would really slow it down Chapter 32 PERQ Memory System Ve
196. s past PERQ ICL employees preservationists etc Please vote YES to alt sys perq Thank you Robert D Davis uunet mystica rdd rdavis jhunix hcf jhu edu 78 CHAPTER 15 THE ALT SYS PERQ CONTROL MESSAGE Chapter 16 The PERQ CPU e Executes approximately one million Q codes high level machine codes per second which corresponds to a processor power of two thirds of a DEC VAX 11 780 in certain cases e Yields considerable speed increases when critical functions are mi crocoded e 16 bit ALU Arithmetic Logic Unit e 20 bit 17 function ALU e up to 1 million Pascal P codes per second e AK to 16K x 48 bits of 170ns writable control store much faster than main memory e The central processing unit single printed circuit board is a 16 bit wide 170 nanosecond instruction time microprogrammed device e The instructions are single byte instructions followed by up to 4 bytes of parameters e Processor has a 170 nanosecond microcycle time e Uses 48 bit wide microinstructions e Most data paths in the microengine are 20 bits wide e Data entering leaving the procesor are 16 bits wide the extra four bits allow the processor to calculate real addresses in a 1 megaword 2MB addressing space 79 80 CHAPTER 16 THE PERQ CPU e Virtual addresses are kept in a doubleword in memory but calculations on addresses can be single precision within the processor 16 4 PERQ 1 e The microprogrammed CPU performs many of the
197. s the Eth Can board don t think it ever had an official designation and the proper cable Essentially the Perq builds the bitmap for the printer in memory and simply shoves the bits down the wire to the printer which is really just the marking engine CL March 31 1993 You see I ve acquired a Canon LBP8A1 with major electronic prob lems and Canon will not supply a service manual However I ve deduced some things about it by looking inside and one thing that struck me is that the electronics is split between that mounted on the engine chasis and the controller board in the top cover that contains the 68000 CPU Now accord ing to the PERQ schematics the laser printer port on the PERQ 2 is neither serial well not RS232 or anything like that or parallel It appears to be a direct connection to the laser engine and may well output a carefully timed bitstream that directly modulates the laser ARD mailing list March 31 1993 CX printers when bought from Canon have a Video interface a single bit serial data stream that has the page image expressed as a bit map It is up to the vendor to turn the page description language into a bitmap Some kind of board is required and 221 222 CHAPTER 45 LASER PRINTER it may have various interfaces Imagen printers originally went from Impress the Xerox page description language to bitmaps Perq never sold Imagen printers We sold a printer based on a
198. s an illegal command The command isn t legal but you get to try From screen pas change log of Feb 4 1983 ICL played a role in the PERQs screen driver ICL s version of screen pas to clear up a few problems This module is identical to the one received from ICL via August Reinig volumesystem pas page 1 indicates that there seem to have been plans for the PERQs to use external hard disks with removable packs From volumesystem pas page 4 288CHAPTER 62 INTERESTING NOTES FROM POS G 2 SOURCE CODE MaxTotalVols is the upperlimit on the numer of file system volumes that can be mounted at one time MinVolID and MaxVolID delimit the range of non nil i e actually mounted file system volumes NilVolID denotes a volume different from any possible mounted volume Const MaxTotalVols 8 MaxVolID MaxTotalVols 1 MinVolID 0 NilVolID MinVolID 1 From volumesys pas page 17 Note that Disk Operations are directed toward 3 different classes of devices CIO Shugart Floppy EIO Shugart Micropolis and SMD Index 1960s 10 LISP 10 1972 1973 11 3RCC 7 8 Mach 8 MIT 1978 8 Lisp Machines 9 1980 8 9 MK2 10 1983 8 music 7 1985 8 networking Accent 8 10 token ring 9 ACM Newbury Paul 7 Siggraph 8 Nu bus 9 AI 8 9 Apollo 8 PARC 7 PDP 11 40 7 Barel Miles 9 PERQ Systems 8 Broadly Bill 7 PNX 9 Clocksin Bill 8 Rae Robert 8 CMU 7 9 RAL 8
199. s and Dragons Cool Daemons PERQs CMU Coke Machine Data General Veteran Joins Local High Tech Firm MegaScan Pgh Business Times DDS description file PERQ 3 file IopDDS doc A Debugger for POS PERQ Pascal by Brad A Myers May 20 1983 3RCC 13 pages A Debugger for POS PERQ Pascal from user library A Debugger for a Graphical Workstation summary and intro only J D Bovery at U K C deflection yoke technical information PERQ 3 file ytext Design Note on Logic Section ADI4 PERQ 3 file adi4 doc Design Note on Logic Section 514 PERQ 3 file asi4 doc Design Note on Logic Section CACHE4 PERQ 3 file cache4 doc Design Note on Section PRO4 PERQ 3 file DiskTest docs for PERQ 3 file DiskTest doc A Display Architecture for Driving Two Different Bit Mapped Displays from One Frame Buffer PERQ Distributed Cooperative Processes and Transactions Accent SPICE Five Years Ago Sept 19 1990 ICL amp PERQ Five Years Ago Oct 5 1990 PERQ Systems 112 CHAPTER 20 PERQ DOCUMENTS CATALOGED THUS FAR Five Years Ago Aug 5 1991 ICL dumped PERQ FixBoot floppy Tech Bulletin file fixboot doc FixDisk V1 0x Documentation customer released version of DiskTest file FixDisk doc flames a few comments about PERQs file flames FontEd documentation file fonted doc From RIG to Accent to Mach The Evolution of a N
200. s bars The window manager tracks movement of the mouse and can dynami cally alter the cursor pattern when the user moves the mouse from one area to another The cursor roughly the size of a postage stamp can contain a fair amount of detail The logic behind a large 56 x 64 pixel available cursor is that it is the user s focal point and therefore can be used to pass important information to him A standard set of cursor shapes is provided plus utility software for creating new cursors it is Progress bars appear on screen in both the icon and the window title Reflects Accent s dedication to transparent communications by allowing users to create windows on a local machine that control processes running 5 4 MATCHMAKER 45 on any other machine residing on the LINQ network 5 4 Matchmaker A program available with Accent which creates a remote procedure call to the message system automating the linkage between client and server processes May be used to generate procedures for automatically sending and re ceiving messages between processes which may be written in any of the supported languages Matchmaker does all the work of appropriately packing the procedure arguments into messages on the client side extracting incoming procedure arguments from message fields on the server side formatting the response on the server side and returning that data to the client process It is language sensitive i e understands how to tr
201. s on the input output boards have direct memory access and use four word data transfers A bad parity facility allows the parity checking logic to be tested 11 2 Memory Data Out MDO The four words each with a parity bit are loaded from the array to the memory data out buffer Words defined by the fetch function are enabled 63 64 CHAPTER 11 PERQ BUS SYSTEM on the memory data out highway MDO Parity is checked for each word enabled 11 3 IO Bus IOB The I O bus IOB connects the CPU to I O devices It consists of an 8 bit address IOA which is driven from a microword field and a 16 bit bidirectional data bus IOD which is read via AMux and written from R Result Chapter 12 Computer Conservation Society Article 586 of alt sys perq Path mysticaluunet spool mu edu howland reston ans net pipex demon envex demon co uk From chrisQenvex demon co uk Chris P Burton Newsgroups alt sys perq Subject Computer Conservation Society LONG ARTICLE Message ID lt 760740223snz envex demon co uk gt Date 8 Feb 94 20 43 43 GMT Sender usenet demon co uk Reply To chrisQenvex demon co uk Organization Envex Services Lines 170 X Newsreader Demon Internet Simple News v1 27 Since the PERQ is what we might call a vintage machine I assume readers are interested in such machines and might not have heard of or would like to know more about the Computer Conservation Society the CCS The CCS is a Specialist G
202. sic random access store e drivers buffers e control e logic circuits generating the visual display signals Maximum memory capacity 2 MBytes 1 Megaword Can be accessed by other boards through the memory data and address highways Display generation circuitry on the memory board is controlled by the CPU via the I O data bus The memory board signals the CPU when any requests for memory access are made the CPU has logic circuits to deal with any contention 32 1 Memory Access Micro instructions control CPU access to the memory allowing e The storage of 1 2 or 4 16 bit words e The fetching of 1 2 or 4 16 bit words These words may be accessed in forward or reverse order MADR MDI MDO Timing for the transfer and CPU use of multiple 16 bit words requires the provision of only single word buffers within the CPU for memory data in and out Requests for memory access are signalled to the CPU board where logic circuits deal with any contention 32 2 Direct Memory Access DMA The direct memory access controller has 6 channels for access to the PERQ memory board The EIO board circuits use four of these channels One for the fixed disc two for OSLAN and one for the Z80 system The other two channels are for I O options 32 2 DIRECT MEMORY ACCESS DMA 157 The DMA controller has header and address registers for each channel which it updates after data transfers The registers are loaded initially by the CPU Data t
203. ss files on another system e the network is also used to provide access to shared resources such as printers and tape drives which cannot be provided to each workstation economically e by connecting a resource to one PERQ on a network all other PERQ workstations can share that resource e Ethernet trademark of Xerox Corp 10 Mbit sec local network Under POS D 6 on April 5 1992 it was planned to get a working version of IP TCP TCPOS IP TCP for POS George Robertson was supposed to have been working on this The scale of effort for this project was to be Etc and blah blah Blah blah etc and so forth Actual quote from a short TCPOS document 38 2 Ethernet Contrast Etnernet to the Cambridge Ring A number of connected nodes can broadcast messages which include a destination address Uses a contention technique where the different nodes must listen to the transmission medium the ether and broadcast when the medium is quiet Sophisticated hardware is required to check for collisions of broadcast packets The propagation delay limits the total Ethernet size 38 3 XNS 181 38 3 XNS The PERQ 26220 Xerox Network Systems or XNS Protocols Consists of a set of software modules designed to allow users to develop high level application programs which involve communication among het erogenious workstations computers and other devices through one or more local area networks The protocols offer the ability to
204. st Robert Malcolm Jamie 266 CHAPTER 61 PERQ HATERS Chapter 62 Interesting Notes from G 2 Source Code At the beginning of the change log for PERQ QCODE 7 POS Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards Job Chapter 5 At the end of change log for the 1 0 microcode for the EIO Miicro it was apparently written by Kwok W Sheh In memory This code is dedicated to all of those who foundation for the perfection of the current microcode The PERQ boot loaded microcode assumes that if booting PDP 11 is on the other end Quotation found in CIO I microcode cioio micro page Krismas systen have lay the technology from a LINK a 21 Important if there are any micro registers left store the 4 bytes into them rather than memory then copy into permanent memory But for now what the hack 267 268CHAPTER 62 INTERESTING NOTES FROM POS G 2 SOURCE CODE Around August 1982 PERQ device numbers were changed For example the keyboard changed from device 7 to device 10 octal Was this one of the changes between POS F and G The Z80 is shut off for a few milliseconds during the boot sequence because the hardware has a glitch when first starting up the Writable Control Store RAM the power surge can screw up the Z80 Comment on page 7 of PERQ system loader microcode Good load we hope From change log for CIO diagnostic microcode V1 5 John P Strait wrote Run memory di
205. still rev 10 and still a bogus hack floating around MIT Perq Spice Lisp was the first workstation implementation of Com mon Lisp CL Nov 2 1992 4 2 Alt sys perq On March 2 1993 I posted the proposal for alt sys perq to alt config Malcolm J Shute was very helpful with the drafting of this proposal and was extremely encouraging about the newsgroups creation In fact he suggested that such a group be created I sent the control message for the creation of this newsgroup and Uunet added it to the groups they carry on April 5 1993 4 3 PERQ Fanatics Mailing Lists The original list was started by Chris Lamb around November exact date 1992 A while after he stopped working at TSSI he could no longer make changes to the subscribers of the list and soon afterwards that list ended the last message was May 8 1993 Chris attempted to start another list from the computer at a company he co founded but due to a network connection problem that list never became a reality Jamie L Jones in Wales started a new PERQ Fanatics mailing list on June 10 1993 Jamie appointed Malcolm J Shute and I to be co administrators of the list In an attempt to get as many subscribers to this mailing list as possible and in an attempt to dig up as much information about PERQ as possible 4 4 ORIGINAL UCODE 37 I sent Jamie a list of all of the people that I had ever contacted about the PERQs and everyone that I knew of to have ever
206. stop mode for transactional applications e 100 IPS for high speed streaming disk dumps e large storage capacity e fully ANSI and IBM compatible e built in diagnostics e compact size 8 75 height e microprocessor based e high data reliability Some 9 track 1 2 tape drives may be attached via the GPIB The Perq did support a GPIB tape drive with a 488 interface I don t recall the name of the vendor but Idea does nota sound rignt that may be the product name An old HP GPIB drive might work If not it wouldn t be hard to fix the code for any specific drive as long as the hardware worked Brian Rosen mailing list Dec 8 1992 100 CHAPTER 18 PERQ MASS STORAGE DISK amp TAPE 18 12 Streaming cartridge tape drive model 3521 tape drive mfr Archive transfer rate 30 IPS 20 Megabyte 30 Kbytes Sec capacity 21 6 MB unformatted 20 MB formatted recording tracks form 4 track serpentine recording code run length limited RLL head format read while write with seperate erase recording density 8 000 bits inch data reliability recoverable error rate no more than 1 in 108 bits device reliability MTBF 3 500 hours MTTR j 30 min holds approx the same amount of data as 16 8 floppies uses DC 300A type cartridges QIC 02 According to Chris Lamb it may be possible to daisy chain up to three or four of these tape drives QIC 02 tape drives use the same 50 pin connector as SCSI drives but are n
207. structions are in Q code The PNX system s intermediate level instructions are in C code Interrupt requests are sent to the CPU from the memory and I O boards when they require attention Requests remain pending until polled by the microprogram Each interrupt causes a unique value vector to be input to the micro sequencer The CPU microcode jumps to the routine appropriate to the interrupting device The interrupts are not maskable or unconditional 51 1 Interrupts The memory and I O boards send interrupt requests to the CPU when they require attention The requests remain pending until polled by the micro program Each interrupt causes a unique value vector to be input to the micro sequencer The CPU microcode jumps to the routine appropriate to the interrupting device The interrupts are not maskable or unconditional 235 236 CHAPTER 51 PERQ SOFTWARE 51 2 Known Operating Systems POS PERQ Systems MPOS PERQ Systems Multitasking POS Accent PERQ Systems and CMU QNIX Spider Systems UNIX that runs under Accent SPOONIX PNX ICL FLEX RSE 51 3 PERQ Pascal e Upward compatible extension of the Pascal programming language e Designed to support the construction of large systems programs e Extensions are based on BSI ISO Pascal Standard USCD Workshop on Systems Programming Extensions to the Pascal Language PASCAL P the should be superscripted Based mostly on this
208. t It really isn t bad in fact it s perfectly well formed except for the random index which runtime scavenging will add for us It s only called bad because it has the pages of all the segments that WERE bad I ve found that running the Accent Scavenger on a new partition which will be used for Accent files before adding any files to it appears to resolve this problem of files appearing in the directory listing which can t be read or deleted When using POS simply running Scavenger and answering yes to the prompts after it asks if the directories should be rebuilt solves this problem 48 10 Stut Never use any versions of this prior to version 1 8 Version 2 0 is preferred are these just the POS versions Dave Callen according to Chris Lamb Note there s also a version that I hacked so that it can dump tape directory listings to a file RDD 48 11 PERQ1 vs PERQ2 Floppy Drives Although the 8 floppy drives used in the PERQ 1 and PERQ 2 series sys tems appear to be alike there is one small difference the ones in the PERQ2 systems have slightly larger front panels When attempting to place a drive from a T2 into a PERQ 1 I was unable to put the PERQs front panel back on because the opening for the floppy drive was just a wee bit too small probably about one eigth of an inch or so 230 CHAPTER 48 PERQ QUIRKS AND HINTS 48 12 Exploding Capacitors on CPU Board I left the front cover of the machi
209. t and operational flexibility because it supports multiple co equal environments These environments include the native Accent a LISP environment for artificial intelligence applications as well as an advanced UNIX System V implementation QNIX These en vironments can reside simultaneously under Accent For example says Coleman a window on the screen can be running LISP while at the same time a second window is running QNIX and a third is operating under the 42 CHAPTER 5 THE ACCENT OS native Accent environment Programs written in LISP or under the UNIX operating system can be easily ported to Accent using this feature The Accent kernel provides facilities which offer unique microcode implemented language support that yield multiple co equal instruction set architectures Each process utilizes an instruction set that is optimized for the language on which the process is written Pascal C FORTRAN or LISP Says Coleman Accent changes instruction sets dynamically depending upon the language of the process it is executing This allows processes to run more efficiently Allows processes in different languages to communicate with each other through Accent Interprocess Communication using MatchMaker e Priced at less than 1 000 e Available for shipment in July 1984 e integrated on line help facility e icons for window control and process status e windows can be on local machine or on another machine on the network
210. t connection of one processor unit to another This feature is not generally available but it is used in manufacturing test and other special applications The OIO board has the link logic built in The link board provides for an external connection to the I O data bus Control and data lines from the link are isolated from the bus by receiver amplifiers on the link board Control and data lines to the link come from buffer registers on the link board The link board also holds a test pattern PROM and echo facility logic circuits for checking the link The link if fitted is the forst choice as a system extablishment load device A sequence of 16 bit word transfers is used to load 256 microin structions into the control store RAM There is no sum check on the data which is transferred directly to the control store About connecting link boards From what I recall of a conversation with Dave Callen you connect them in a big X the top connector on one board to the bottom connector on the other and vice versa CL April 8 1993 About adding link circuitry The link is easy to add but you would have to have the schematics to do it The CX support as I recall was more complicated Brian Rosen mailing list Dec 9 1993 147 148 CHAPTER 29 LINK BOARD Chapter 30 PERQ LISP AI with the PERQ AI workstation sounds like theres a lot of mar keting hype going on lots of different names for the s
211. t etc from whatever position the heads were in To solve this used to take sparkie apart and carefully push the heads back manually As it was impractical tp take it apart all the time here comes the kludge would open the door of the drive and carefully stick a ruler in forcing the heads back yuck but it worked Incidently after the heads were pushed back and the disk mounted it would always seek back and forth correctly Howevr as soon as unmounted and tried to remount no joy would have to manually push the heads back again weird eh Anyway it sort of fixed itself after a while as have most of the perq problems I ve had I m sure it s alive So would suggest you look at the drive as you try to mount the disk Do the heads correctly home before attempting to mount Just a thought Jamie 18 4 PERQ2 T1 8 35 Meg Micropolis 1200 Hard Disk The Micropolis M1200 Series 8 disk drives have a built in intelligent controller for handling mechanical operations Serial data is transferred to and from the disc drive at 720 kilobytes per second The track to track seek time is 12 milliseconds and the average data access time is 50 milliseconds A further 8 inch basic or slave drive may be daisy chained from the master drive but cannot be fitted in a PERQ2 T1 cabinet It takes approximately 30 seconds for the drive to come up to speed There is a delay in the extablishment p
212. t the ACM s Siggraph in Chicago 2 12 1980 In The first PERQ was delivered Sept 1980 or October 1980 Note that there was a conflict between two newspaper articles with regards to the date Three Rivers moves into the building at 720 Gross St in Bloomfield with 35 full time employees and 10 15 part time employees Sept 1980 Note that the following information appeared in the publication Accent A communication oriented network operating system kernel Rashid Robertson An implementation of the Accent IPC Facility as a commu nication facility for VAX UNIX has been in use since March 1980 7 Network servers written in PASCAL have also been implemented and are now in use The PERQ implementation of the full Accent Kernel is now September 1980 being tested and refined Note Another possible reason for the Perq and its use with the Spice project taking a wild guess here and the selection of this project done at CMU by the DOD may have something to do with again something related to Xerox the fact that the XEROX Pilot OS did not meet the first and the most controversial requirement in the design of Accent which was that a logically distinct and independent address space was to be used for each process supported by the kernel Also note that while this was an advantage in the area of reliability executing programs written in languages that are not safe the possibility that a properly written pr
213. t this picture file was originally in a different pic format a part of the original PERQ picture file collection at C M U as I suspect a few other files in that collection to be not a lot of them buit at least apparenty a few may have survived What ever happened to the C M U PERQ picture files collection How can the files from the Poskanzer Bitmap Collection be converted to PERQ pic files Actually the bitmap RObert mentions is a couple of ray traced spheres floating above the PERQ Systems Corp logo which receds into the distance One ball is reflective the other opaque the light source is from above your left shoulder as you view the bitmap It is on the ftp site as a Sun rasterfile black and white only not colow and not greyscale The dithering algorythm used was very good though At a viewing distance of about 3 5 feet it looks very very smooth CL Nov 28 1992 26 2 Strawberry Fairchild The Strawberry Fairchild program found on a tape with the Audre soft ware is sort of weird and has a bit of surrealism thrown in It starts out with four playing cards on the screem then this surrealistic scene and poem about dolphins and the moon appears as an angry looking moon appears at the top of the screen the background of the screen in black a poem in large eerily shaped letters appears below it images of dolphins are under the poem and a the image of a dolphin glides across the screen The next 26
214. ted out as a maintenance organization to repair and provide parts and supplies for the PERQs and was run by former employees of PERQ Systems The name Accent Systems can be a bit deceiving since the firms name leads one to believe that they would have more to do with the Accent OS than other apects relating to the PERQs To the contrary much of Accent Systems business had to do with suporting PERQs running POS although they also did sell the Accent OS as well as PNX Unix for the PERQs Accent Systems went through several changes First it merged with a company called Scribe which produced text formatting software and the name became Scribe Accent When the Scribe side of the business began losing money the PERQ part was still making a profit but gt This is when I began writing this manuscript and when the majority of it was com pleted Please refer to the Procrastinator s Anonymous web page for further information www rddavis org rdd procrastinators html 6PNX was never supported by Accent Systems however 2 18 1986 25 not enough to support both of them Next the company name changed to Integra Scribe At this point when one would call for information about the PERQs it was difficult to get ahold of someone there who even knew what a PERQ was The name then changed to SAY Technology By this point it turns out that when Scribe Accent was losing money they went bankrupt and the landlord had siezed all of the PERQ related
215. th other Ethernet compatible office equipment 53 CHAPTER 7 ADVERTS AND ETC The PERQ system is a highly integrated set of components designed to provide a complete computing environment for a single user PERQ is a personal computer with sufficient power and facilities to perform a wide variety of tasks found in offices research facilities business and government By concentrating on the needs of one person Three Rivers Computer Corporation has been able to offer computer users a very powerful tool for computing needs at an attractive price The key to the small size and low cost of PERQ is that all components of the system were designed together with the goal of minimizing system complexity PERQ combines the work capacity and processing speed of a mini computer with the price of a traditional microcomputer and adds a graphics capability that is superior to both The foundations of PERQ s high performance are its large memory capacity and processing power giving it exceptionally large compu tation ability and speed of operation and enabling the flicker free image on the display to be manipulated in the most complex ways with such speed that even realistic animation is possible PERQ s unrivalled graphics capability has put it in a league of its own The graphics tablet works with a variety of pointing devices for point and act efficiency in using pop up menus and and in the ma nipulation of screen images PERQ Systems beli
216. that all applications would be migrated to Accent and POS would die POS always seemed to be a temporary solution It would have been possible to emulate POS but it may not have been fast in some cases If it were done right it would have been possible to have multiple POS windows 5 9 Accent S5 According to Dave Callen Accent S5 is a bit buggy I haven t verified this since I ve been using Accent S6 5 10 Naming of Accent CMU planned to port Accent to every computer they owned Ac cent of course is the prototype of Mach which is ported to every computer CMU owns There was as recall a debate about what 48 CHAPTER 5 THE ACCENT OS to call it and Accent won don t recall CMU saying we could not use the name Solar remember it as being some of us didn t want to call it Accent By the way do you know why it is called Accent It is so named because it is a message based operating system Message msg MSG Monosodium Glutimate Accent Brian Rosen mailing list Dec 9 1992 Chapter 6 The Action List Action items that were discussed at a meeting on Jan 10 1983 at Alpha What or where was Alpha Present at meeting Brian Rosen Jim Gay Ed Fredkin Geoff Potter Jeff Howell Ken Young Joe Novak Decide if a backplane stiffener is necesary to prevent bowing when inserting cards To be designed by ICL is needed As signed to Geoff Potter It was determined that this was needed pr
217. the early days It is catalogued but not easily accessible yet SIMULATION AND EMULATION Hard to draw the line between them Quite a lot of interest has been shown in the museum world by some of the simulators written by members to model the behaviour of early and in some cases extinct machines The techniques are applicable to any large functionally opaque object At the moment simulators for EDSAC Pegasus Elliott 803 and Ferranti Mercury exist and the Elliott 401 is under development An emulator for the original Manchester Prototype has been obtained by a devious route from the net but I have yet to work out it s provenance SEMINARS At least one all day seminar is held at the Science Museum annually where usually pioneers of some system give talks and discussions This year s will be on the IBM 360 coinciding with the 30th anniversary of the launch LECTURE PROGRAMME A programme of evening lectures is given during the year on relevant topics PUBLICATIONS All members receive the quarterly bulletin called Resurrection currently free of charge This has short articles transcripts of lectures and reports on work in progress INFORMATION CAPTURE The CCS recognises that not only are early machines dying off but so are many of the pioneers An urgent programme of interviewing and video and audio recording pioneers has been started but is not progressing well due to lack of suitable interviewers
218. tors are broken into two parts The first part is a header which tells the disk controller which sector this is The second part is the data section it holds one block of data The sector headers are written once during formatting The data portion changes on each write On a Perg each sector has three parts not two There are two headers the physical header and the logical header The physical header looks and acts just like the standard header and is written once during formatting The logical header is written the first time a block is written when the space allocation is made It has the filelD of the file to which this block belongs and a pointer to the previous and next sectors that have blocks in this file By reading 216 CHAPTER 42 POS PERQ OPERATING SYSTEM the logical headers it is possible to rebuild the entire disk volume data structures Sectors that are unallocated are part of a free list which is doubley linked like a real file The directory structure is redundantly kept by having a zeroth block in every file that has a copy of the directory information By reading all the labels you can find all the block zero s and recreate the directory The disk controller is designed to do this and it is custom This makes it impossible to use a SCSI disk or a standard disk controller with the POS file system actually don t remember how the undelete command works ie what structure remembers that there was a file a
219. tter Test new tablet PCB validate artwork Jeff Howell Design and document changes to landscape housing Ken Young Prepare burn in software Lee Harris RFI test for FCC regulations Geoff Potter Modify boot switch to allow easy operation at any angle of tilt Geoff Potter and Ken Young Design new layout of backplane Geoff Potter Determine if power supply mounting can be changed to make floppy removal installation easier Ken Young Respecify gasketing on back of cabinet backplane Ken Young Improve shock hazzard protection design covers for all AC wiring to minimize chance of accidental contact Dale ICL Design labels warning of shock hazzard Ken Young Determine if barrier strip harness can be redesigned to minimize possibility of incorrect assembly Ken Young Circuit breaker service difficult and hazardous redesign cabinet to mount circuit breaker to frame Dale ICL Paint adhesion has been a problem determine if problem has been fixed by vendor Ed Maples and Ken Young Rear panel connector mounting is difficult determine if it can be improved Geoff Potter Determine if DDS visibility can be improved no change Geoff Potter Check speaker mounting to see if accoustics are acceptible re design mounting if necessary Andy Verostic Go around and get more feedback on keyboard key legending respecify if necessary Art Lim 51 52 CHAPTER 6 THE ACTION LIST Chapter 7 Adverts a
220. ule to rig something up 245 246 CHAPTER 54 PERQ SPEECH SYNTHESIZER 54 1 How Sound is Recorded onto a PERQ This is all kind of fuzzy The Perq uses a sound chip that implements an algorythm called Delta Modulation This is basically a compression tech nique that lets the bit rate for speech be low The chip is bidirectional but I don t recall that we had the input analog circuitry on the board Maybe we had an off board box that was used to record sounds Since the algorythm was known and simple some folks converted sounds they had to delta mod form and some of the music is done that way However as implemented the sound system does not have high fidelity about 6 KHz or so as I recall and would not make a good music source Brian Rosen mailing list Dec 9 1992 Chapter 55 PERQ Tablet LN3000 Tablets with mouse e completely flat surface e active area 8 25 x 10 75 portrait or 12 x 10 landscape e electromagnetic operation e three button mouse e maximum distance from display 8 er back of display Optional high resolution digitizer e active area 11 x 11 e 0 005 resolution e choice of four button puck or stylus e maximum distance from base unit 8 247 248 CHAPTER 55 PERQ TABLET Chapter 56 Technical Miscellany The PERQ graphic workstations were most unique computing machines several years ahead of their time Blazingly fast raster Op blit blit graph ics with 60 Hz
221. used or knew anything about PERQs The results of this were quite interesting to say the least While some very useful and interesting information was posted to the mailing list as a result of this there were also a lot of angry people who demended to be removed from the mailing list They were quite angry that they were automatically subscribed to it without their permission This automatic subscription occured on July 29 1993 a few weeks after Jamie Malcolm and myself debated the ethics of subscribing people in this manner 4 4 Original uCode They told me they developed a lot of it PERQ microcode on a PDP 11 running RSX or something like that The floppy format was the same fot that reason Tom Brusehaver mailing list Nov 30 1992 38 CHAPTER 4 MORE PERQ HISTORY Chapter 5 The Accent OS Accent was developed jointly by PERQ Systems Corp and the SPICE Project in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University SPICE is an acronym for Scientific Personal Integrated Computing Environment e fundamentally designed to enhance network services e processes that are remote communicate with each other by the use of messages in the same way as processes on a local machine e is a product of over 5 years of research dedicated to achieving a very attractive alternative to time shared computing systems e provides interprocess communication e transparent access to network resources e mu
222. using a new tape you should use the erase command to remove any glitches that may have been put on the tape by stray magnetic fields The software used to read from and write to tapes is Stut which is mentioned below Stut This is the standard version of stut supplied by the manufactured of the PERQs Stut2 This is a version of Stut that I modified to allow one to dump the directory listing of a tape to a file This is useful since there is no other way that I m aware or that the output of original version of Stut can be redirected to a file Booting PERQs Hard disk initialization etc Booting a PERQ 194 CHAPTER 39 PERQ KEEPER S GUIDE To boot a PERQ from a floppy disk install the disk in the drive close the drive door press the reboot button and hold down the A key Note this must be an upper case A A working boot floppy is different for each Perq model This is because the boot floppy tells the system how many sectors are on the hard disk Do not attempt to boot a machine with the wrong boot floppy This wil not boot the machine and it coult wipe out data on the hard disk A special autoboot floppy was made by Advent systems When this floppy is used it is not necessary to keep pressing on the A key to get the PERQ to boot Another useful boot disk that some may have is the fastboot floppy which significantly reduces the amount of time that it takes to boot the PERQ from a floppy drive
223. vas from losing the little bugger when its the last thing on a line There has to be a better way From expr2 pas ifNextParam lt gt nil then Error 126 Gee Extra parameters 271 Found in pascal pas Abstract Based on Zurich P2 Portable Compiler Modified extensively From pascal pas change log Miles A Barel s 3 1 revision on April 1 1981 Fix Command and Filename parser for the new 05 Was this for Solar or MPOS Changes made to the Pascal compiler to use a unique type of input file handling intrinsic as opposed to Pascal intrinsics were made by Michael R Kristofic on May 8 1981 Attempted SABOTAGE by someone at CMU Scott Brown s entry in the pascal pas change log for V9 9 reads Fix the value of the constant handle _all it should be true It Seems that someone at CMU carelessly changed it to false for unknown reasons From page 1 or pascal pas Scott Brown s Nov 13 1982 entry for V9 3 Start a series of bug fixes This series of fixes is being made to version 9 2 which is all compilers before POS and Solar compilers are diverged to have completely separate sources From page 1 or pascal pas Scott Brown s Nov 18 1982 entry for V9 5 Fix the problem of the compiler generating bad code when range checking is changed within a for statement This fix compliments of 272CHAPTER 62 INTERESTING NOTES FROM POS G 2 SOURCE CODE Dave Golub and Brad Myers the credit blam
224. w QCode is not exactly PCode but it was derived from it As an interesting sidelight Microsoft now has an equivalent of Pcode in Windows PCode is efficient in code size much more than 80x86 instruc tions It is used for code which is not performance sensitive and is intended to reduce code storage requirements for big programs The Microsoft C compiler can generate PCode and Windows has a PCode interpreter PNX used a different instruction set from POS and Accent Some pro grams loaded in their own microcode which augmented QCode for special purposes Brian Rosen mailing list Dec 7 1992 At a later time when I posted questions about QDis and an assembler There s something that s been puzzling me about the PERQs running POS why was a disassembler QDis provided when no assembler was pro vided Does anyone know of any assembler that was ever written for the PERQs the following reply was posted by Brian Rosen September 10 1993 QDis exists as a last resort debugger of the compiler Some code was written in assembler but this was done with the inline operations of the compiler 42 14 Undeleting Files and Scrounge The Perq has a very good very interesting way of doing this It is also wrapped up in the scrounge program which fixes broken disks The mechanism is very simplem and very non portable On a standard disk the surface is broken into tracks and each track is broken into sectors Sec
225. wide x 18 deep keyboard 1 3 4 high x 8 1 4 wide x 10 3 4 deep graphics tablets 243 244CHAPTER 53 PERQ POWER SUPPLY SPECS AND SYSTEM DIMENSIONS ETC portrait 1 2 high x 8 1 4 wide x 10 3 4 deep landscape 1 2 high x 12 wide x 10 deep e digitizing tablet 9 16 high x 15 1 2 wide x 15 1 2 deep Chapter 54 PERQ Speech Synthesizer A continuously variable slope delta CVSD modulator is employed at a 16 kilobaud data rate to provide arbitrary stored speech output e Pre recorded CVSD data is stored on the system disk for voice re sponse audible signaling and other speech applications e A Continuously Variable Slope Delta Modulator is used to provide arbitrary stored speech output e Can be used for a speech synthesizer to go along with voice input circuitry in order to provide a user interface less conventional than a screen and keyboard One of the spk files include one of a woman s voice announcing the PERQ as a landmark computer system Dave Callen gave me a file with some music by Handel on it I was told by him that someone in Japan was exerimenting with the PERQs sound capabilities and created the Handel spk file I think that a guy named Phil Mason up in Wisconsin somewhere actually has one of the microphones they used to record the sounds for the demos or at least has a schematic for making one work It s really a very simple interface so I can t imagine that it s diffic
226. within it can be expanded by click so that the text substitution is inserted in place and some more fancy stuff HPS Information on GUIDE was published rather widely Also no microde pro gramming was being done at this time at UKC because ICL considered it to be strictly secret they did not want the details of it known This was within a two year timeframe most likely between 1983 and 1985 since they continued to use the PERQs until they were taken off the market Many PERQ orders got cancelled in favor of SUNI s because they got tired of waiting for PERQs to be delivered The PERQ was superior in many ways to the SUN 1 which had a 68000 CPU with no user writable microcode lacked the PERQs fast BitBlt graphics engine and it had a kludgey MMU that imposed some annoying restrictions HS Countries where the PERQs seemed to be fairly widely used U S British Isles Germany Canada and Switzerland legal to get bootleg copies of software there and may be a good source for finding some PERQ software to run under PNX or copies of the PNX operating system The use of the PERQs in Japan is a possibility but it is questionable as to how widespread their use is or was Perq 1 production began ended number of units produced Had the most reliable disk drive least reliable I 0 boards Perq 2 production began ended number of units produced Perq T 1 production began ended number of units produced 2 21 THING
227. y local and wide area networks SERC s Common Base Policy was not intended as a fixed standard but was expected to evolve in an orderly way to reflect continuing technological innovation and advances in computing methods Anticipated a transition which was to take place around the end of the decade approx 1990 to computing systems in which the operating system as well as computing facilities supplied by network servers would be distributed over the network Adopted UNIX as the SERC Common Base Policy standard Someone who worked for ICL or SERC in those days should be able to give a comprehensive answer but in the meantime from a user s memory c 1981 82 ICL started selling the PERQ under license in Europe Mid 1982 the Science and Engineering Research Council recommended the Perq as the workstation hardware element of their Common Base Policy or what ever its name was then As a result of this in the autumn of 1982 the 231 232 CHAPTER 49 S E R C funding body for computing in universities recommended that a Perq then Perql with 4K wcs 1MB ram 40MB disk running the PascalP code based single tasking POS op sys be bought for each of the 33 university com puting centres these were bought at a bulk price of GPB 5M approx 33 discount I recall that the price we quoted it those days for a somewhat lamer is is still Sun was twice that A year later system were shipped with 16K wcs which was needed

PERQ Workstations by R. D. Davis

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