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SAIC Galaxy 1100: a pre-CDE VUE of the PA-RISC with a security clearance

bediger4000 4y ago
Good article. PA-RISC is a little weirder than the article lets on. The stack and heap are reversed - heap starts high and grows lows, while the stack starts low and grows up. This probably prevents a lot of casual buffer overflows. It also has a 4-bit segment register. It's not the ugly overlapping segmentation of the x86, more like a register that selects completely different, non-overlapping, address spaces.
- classichasclass 4y ago
  (author) Thanks! Yes, HP-UX does do that with the stack and heap, but I don't believe this was obligatory to PA-RISC; that's just how the calling convention was defined.
shrubble 4y ago
What was the maximum power usage? Was it 70W which is the amount on the power supply?
- classichasclass 4y ago
  (author) Yes, I believe so. I've never seen it exceed that.
karmakaze 4y ago
Interesting that it's running NeXTSTEP. We had not this but a different PA-RISC machine in the office where I worked running HP-UX. If you click/open image in new tab/click again to zoom, you'll find it's much higher resolution than the in-page view. There's even a BeOS box in the top-right.
CobaltFire 4y ago
I should have taken the PA-RISC machine that was offered to me a few years back. It was also an old Navy machine, and had the entire SAN with it. It was one of the big towers, a 120MHz if I recall correctly, dual socket. A J200 or J210 I think. I was told it was an old setup for a flight simulator (this was at a training command). I didn't have space or a use for it, but as far as I know it's still sitting in that closet. It had been there for 10+ years and no-one was moving it.
- wkat4242 4y ago
  I owned a J210XC for a while. It was not dual socket despite the huge and heavy case. It ran 32-bit 120Mhz. Mine had 1GB of memory though which was amazingly huge at the time (a PC would come with 128MB perhaps) Eventually I got rid of it because it was just such a huge ass box... I regret it a bit. I do have a small pizza box though.
wkat4242 4y ago
I always loved VUE in college. It was so sophisticated compared to Windows 3.11 (95 wasn't even out yet). Then CDE came and the suits at IBM made the design all boring. I still have a real PA-RISC HP-UX 10.20 box with VUE here for nostalgia.

Good article. PA-RISC is a little weirder than the article lets on. The stack and heap are reversed - heap starts high and grows lows, while the stack starts low and grows up. This probably prevents a lot of casual buffer overflows. It also has a 4-bit segment register. It's not the ugly overlapping segmentation of the x86, more like a register that selects completely different, non-overlapping, address spaces.

classichasclass 4y ago
(author) Thanks! Yes, HP-UX does do that with the stack and heap, but I don't believe this was obligatory to PA-RISC; that's just how the calling convention was defined.

shrubble 4y ago

What was the maximum power usage? Was it 70W which is the amount on the power supply?

classichasclass 4y ago
(author) Yes, I believe so. I've never seen it exceed that.

karmakaze 4y ago

Interesting that it's running NeXTSTEP. We had not this but a different PA-RISC machine in the office where I worked running HP-UX. If you click/open image in new tab/click again to zoom, you'll find it's much higher resolution than the in-page view. There's even a BeOS box in the top-right.

CobaltFire 4y ago

I should have taken the PA-RISC machine that was offered to me a few years back. It was also an old Navy machine, and had the entire SAN with it. It was one of the big towers, a 120MHz if I recall correctly, dual socket. A J200 or J210 I think. I was told it was an old setup for a flight simulator (this was at a training command). I didn't have space or a use for it, but as far as I know it's still sitting in that closet. It had been there for 10+ years and no-one was moving it.

wkat4242 4y ago
I owned a J210XC for a while. It was not dual socket despite the huge and heavy case. It ran 32-bit 120Mhz. Mine had 1GB of memory though which was amazingly huge at the time (a PC would come with 128MB perhaps) Eventually I got rid of it because it was just such a huge ass box... I regret it a bit. I do have a small pizza box though.

wkat4242 4y ago

I always loved VUE in college. It was so sophisticated compared to Windows 3.11 (95 wasn't even out yet). Then CDE came and the suits at IBM made the design all boring. I still have a real PA-RISC HP-UX 10.20 box with VUE here for nostalgia.