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> You needed to install a special little endian firmware (ARC) Was this the same ARC on Alpha gear? I got a PDW tower for cheap on ebay a while back, got it to

> You needed to install a special little endian firmware (ARC) Was this the same ARC on Alpha gear? I got a PDW tower for cheap on ebay a while back, got it to boot... A few times before the I/O board crapped out, and I remember one of the two firmwares was called ARC. (the other being SMRC I think? For OSF/1 and VMS and anything else)

atdrummond 4y ago
I thought the other one was SRM? It’s been a long time.
johndoe0815 4y ago
It looked pretty similar to the Alpha version, but I have no idea if the code bases were related. The later PowerStack II machines (in more-or-less regular PC mini-towers) were able to just reflash the firmware, there was a tool called "Arcinst.exe" IIRC. The regular Alpha firmware was SRM (or SRM console), this was used to boot OSF/1 (aka Digital Unix or Tru64) and VMS. Linux was able to boot both from SRM as well as ARC console. IIRC you had to reconfigure some other stuff when switching between the firmware versions, since the PALcode (think of low-level privileged machine code similar to SBI on RISC-V in M mode today) was different between SRM and ARC. Both PPC and Alpha were rather open platforms back then, the PPC due to the IBM/Motorola/Apple alliance, Motorola's famously good databooks and the PowerOpen (PrEP/CHRP) standards, the Alpha also due to DEC's history in providing excellent documentation and especially John "Maddog" Hall's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Hall_(programmer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Hall_(programmer)) great efforts to support the open source OS communities while he was head of the Unix group at DEC. I still have a TurboChannel Alpha machine (DEC3000) he sent me back then. Good old times sigh. Now all you can hope for is a badly machine-translated and incomplete databook for an obscure Chinese RISC-V SoC... Some more tidbits in case anyone's interested. This web page by Michael Kraemer has more information on NT for the PowerStacks (there's also a lot of other information about 90s computer gear): https://web-docs.gsi.de/~kraemer/COLLECTION/MOTOROLA/wntps.html https://web-docs.gsi.de/~kraemer/COLLECTION/MOTOROLA/wntps.h... And this DEC manual contains more information on Alpha firmware than you ever wanted to know... https://manx-docs.org/collections/antonio/dec/MDS-2000-01/cd1/ALPHA/AXFRMPGA.PDF https://manx-docs.org/collections/antonio/dec/MDS-2000-01/cd... See https://download.majix.org/dec/palcode_dsgn_gde.pdf https://download.majix.org/dec/palcode_dsgn_gde.pdf for PALcode details. Example PALcode can be found at http://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/alpha/palcode.zip http://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/alpha/palcode.zip - it's interesting to read.
- atdrummond 4y ago
  I just realized who you are. First of all, thanks for the info in this thread - the context is great and helps fill in a bunch of the story that the site glosses over. Secondly, I’ve been teaching my nephew and niece Smalltalk on the Raspberry Pi thanks to Crosstalk. So I can finally thank you for bringing that port into the world.
  - johndoe0815 4y ago
    Whoops, my 15 minutes of fame on the Internet :). You're very welcome - great to see this information is still valuable to somebody out there. As a student in the '90s, it was fascinating being able to play around with all sorts of exotic hardware and from time to time grab some of it from the university's scrap heap. One was able to learn so much... I still try to keep some of the old machines running. It becomes harder to find spare parts, but due to great projects by the open source hardware and software community (such as the various SCSI disk emulators and also system emulators such as qemu), some of it has also become much easier. Now I just need more time... And I'm really happy to see that you are using Crosstalk for Smalltalk's original purpose! It's amazing to see the response to my little side project - high time to update it a bit (and add a RISC-V port). I hope your nephew and niece like it!
    - spijdar 4y ago
      I'd like to echo the thanks for taking the time to write everything down here -- I was only born in the late 90s, so these machines are all before my time, and I love learning more about them. I'm stuck with exploring the odd workstations I could get before the last reasonably priced ones dried up, and my modern POWER9 workstation. Things are better in a lot of ways now, but there's something magical about computers that power-on to Forth prompts and have ring binders full of detailed pin-outs and board schematics...
p_l 4y ago
ARC was a specification, more like Open Firmware than specific implementation. NT before 6.0 can in fact boot only using ARC - the NTLDR code is responsible for emulating ARC on PC BIOS systems. It originated on MIPS, iirc, and SGI MIPS machines used a related firmware. On Alpha, there was AlphaBIOS firmware (first as an option that you needed to reflash, then as single mostly integrated package with SRM) which fulfilled the ARC standard combined with BIOS-like setup program.

atdrummond 4y ago

I thought the other one was SRM? It’s been a long time.

johndoe0815 4y ago

It looked pretty similar to the Alpha version, but I have no idea if the code bases were related. The later PowerStack II machines (in more-or-less regular PC mini-towers) were able to just reflash the firmware, there was a tool called "Arcinst.exe" IIRC. The regular Alpha firmware was SRM (or SRM console), this was used to boot OSF/1 (aka Digital Unix or Tru64) and VMS. Linux was able to boot both from SRM as well as ARC console. IIRC you had to reconfigure some other stuff when switching between the firmware versions, since the PALcode (think of low-level privileged machine code similar to SBI on RISC-V in M mode today) was different between SRM and ARC. Both PPC and Alpha were rather open platforms back then, the PPC due to the IBM/Motorola/Apple alliance, Motorola's famously good databooks and the PowerOpen (PrEP/CHRP) standards, the Alpha also due to DEC's history in providing excellent documentation and especially John "Maddog" Hall's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Hall_(programmer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Hall_(programmer)) great efforts to support the open source OS communities while he was head of the Unix group at DEC. I still have a TurboChannel Alpha machine (DEC3000) he sent me back then. Good old times sigh. Now all you can hope for is a badly machine-translated and incomplete databook for an obscure Chinese RISC-V SoC... Some more tidbits in case anyone's interested. This web page by Michael Kraemer has more information on NT for the PowerStacks (there's also a lot of other information about 90s computer gear): https://web-docs.gsi.de/~kraemer/COLLECTION/MOTOROLA/wntps.html https://web-docs.gsi.de/~kraemer/COLLECTION/MOTOROLA/wntps.h... And this DEC manual contains more information on Alpha firmware than you ever wanted to know... https://manx-docs.org/collections/antonio/dec/MDS-2000-01/cd1/ALPHA/AXFRMPGA.PDF https://manx-docs.org/collections/antonio/dec/MDS-2000-01/cd... See https://download.majix.org/dec/palcode_dsgn_gde.pdf https://download.majix.org/dec/palcode_dsgn_gde.pdf for PALcode details. Example PALcode can be found at http://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/alpha/palcode.zip http://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/alpha/palcode.zip - it's interesting to read.

atdrummond 4y ago
I just realized who you are. First of all, thanks for the info in this thread - the context is great and helps fill in a bunch of the story that the site glosses over. Secondly, I’ve been teaching my nephew and niece Smalltalk on the Raspberry Pi thanks to Crosstalk. So I can finally thank you for bringing that port into the world.
- johndoe0815 4y ago
  Whoops, my 15 minutes of fame on the Internet :). You're very welcome - great to see this information is still valuable to somebody out there. As a student in the '90s, it was fascinating being able to play around with all sorts of exotic hardware and from time to time grab some of it from the university's scrap heap. One was able to learn so much... I still try to keep some of the old machines running. It becomes harder to find spare parts, but due to great projects by the open source hardware and software community (such as the various SCSI disk emulators and also system emulators such as qemu), some of it has also become much easier. Now I just need more time... And I'm really happy to see that you are using Crosstalk for Smalltalk's original purpose! It's amazing to see the response to my little side project - high time to update it a bit (and add a RISC-V port). I hope your nephew and niece like it!
  - spijdar 4y ago
    I'd like to echo the thanks for taking the time to write everything down here -- I was only born in the late 90s, so these machines are all before my time, and I love learning more about them. I'm stuck with exploring the odd workstations I could get before the last reasonably priced ones dried up, and my modern POWER9 workstation. Things are better in a lot of ways now, but there's something magical about computers that power-on to Forth prompts and have ring binders full of detailed pin-outs and board schematics...

p_l 4y ago

ARC was a specification, more like Open Firmware than specific implementation. NT before 6.0 can in fact boot only using ARC - the NTLDR code is responsible for emulating ARC on PC BIOS systems. It originated on MIPS, iirc, and SGI MIPS machines used a related firmware. On Alpha, there was AlphaBIOS firmware (first as an option that you needed to reflash, then as single mostly integrated package with SRM) which fulfilled the ARC standard combined with BIOS-like setup program.