3 ms·

Remember that at the time no one put a main-frame class chip on a single die - the 68ks/32ks, and much later 386s were the first generation who managed to pull

Remember that at the time no one put a main-frame class chip on a single die - the 68ks/32ks, and much later 386s were the first generation who managed to pull off putting a large architecture on a chip (I'm trying to make a distinction here between architecture and what particular implementations could do) - in the early 70s mainframes were the size of basketball courts, in the late 70s/early 80s they were the size of a large fridge (and disk drives the size of a washing machine). So splitting it all in 3 wasn't necessarily the crazy idea we might think it is today - it still all fitted on one circuit board!

jandrese 4y ago
It depends on your perspective. From a mainframe/minicomputer standpoint it was pretty good. From the microcomputer perspective it was nuts. Unfortunately for Intel they've always been closely associated with microcomputers so that is the standard by which they were judged.
- twoodfin 4y ago
  At the time it wasn’t at all clear that microcomputers and their architecture would graduate from being toys for hobbyists to ruling the computing world. It was assumed in many circles (including Intel, apparently) that minis and mainframes—really, more “modular” less “integrated” architectures—would own the enterprise. (The dependence on Ada makes a lot more sense in this context: Your mainframe vendor telling you what language you could use wasn’t odd at all in that space.) DEC also essentially fell victim to this misapprehension, and unlike Intel didn’t have a Plan B.
chx 4y ago
One of my favorite crazy facts: in 1991 a Hungarian university got an IBM 3090 mainframe as a gift, while outdated it was still insanely more advanced than anything else available in the country. They found a spot on the top floor for it but it was impossible to get it up there so they removed the roof and used a crane. Memorial page with photos: http://hampage.hu/nosztalgia/netto/ursus/index.html http://hampage.hu/nosztalgia/netto/ursus/index.html In 1995, when another university got a VAX 9000 cluster for the bargain basement price of 50 000 CHF (~130 000 USD equivalent today) -- the Swiss basically discarded it as outdated, this truly was cheap -- and they tried to switch it on, it blew the fuse ... of the district. They needed to run a new power line from the nearest substation.
aidenn0 4y ago
The 68k was so much simpler than the 432 that it came out about over a year earlier, despite starting two years later.
- Taniwha 4y ago
  and yet it was a 32-bit core, vax class architecture, so unix was a relatively easy port. I think the really big problem with the 432 was all that hard wired microcode - rumor has it that it was buggy enough that subroutine calls could take over a millisecond (because they effectively called malloc() which in turn could trigger garbage collection) - stuff that's simply on say a 68k (push the next PC on the stack and jump) becomes a nightmare on a 432 if to fix a bug you need to spin the chip to change the microcode (to be fair at the time rammable microcode was all the rage, but it did take more area and you had to solve the booting problem). Anyway turning off the interrupts for a millisecond is a non starter for so many microcomputer applications ....
cduzz 4y ago
A mainframe style system is a couple of things that the x86 ecosystem is only recently started to get. Some of these (not every "mainframe" had every feature in this list) * nested virtualization -- anything can run inside anything inception style (IBM; maybe others) * smart peripherals -- hey storage get me this record! hey terminal send me the whole message when the user's done typing it out! (most of them) * binary abstraction -- your code is compiled by a bytecode of some sort that's dragged along to abstract decades of underlying hardware changes (IBM, burroughs, probably others) I think there's a bunch of stuff that's unique to unix that people just presume "this is the way" but since I'm mostly stuck in that universe I can't give a quick overview of all the wonky things that are totally alien to unix but totally normal to other systems.

jandrese 4y ago

It depends on your perspective. From a mainframe/minicomputer standpoint it was pretty good. From the microcomputer perspective it was nuts. Unfortunately for Intel they've always been closely associated with microcomputers so that is the standard by which they were judged.

twoodfin 4y ago
At the time it wasn’t at all clear that microcomputers and their architecture would graduate from being toys for hobbyists to ruling the computing world. It was assumed in many circles (including Intel, apparently) that minis and mainframes—really, more “modular” less “integrated” architectures—would own the enterprise. (The dependence on Ada makes a lot more sense in this context: Your mainframe vendor telling you what language you could use wasn’t odd at all in that space.) DEC also essentially fell victim to this misapprehension, and unlike Intel didn’t have a Plan B.

chx 4y ago

One of my favorite crazy facts: in 1991 a Hungarian university got an IBM 3090 mainframe as a gift, while outdated it was still insanely more advanced than anything else available in the country. They found a spot on the top floor for it but it was impossible to get it up there so they removed the roof and used a crane. Memorial page with photos: http://hampage.hu/nosztalgia/netto/ursus/index.html http://hampage.hu/nosztalgia/netto/ursus/index.html In 1995, when another university got a VAX 9000 cluster for the bargain basement price of 50 000 CHF (~130 000 USD equivalent today) -- the Swiss basically discarded it as outdated, this truly was cheap -- and they tried to switch it on, it blew the fuse ... of the district. They needed to run a new power line from the nearest substation.

aidenn0 4y ago

The 68k was so much simpler than the 432 that it came out about over a year earlier, despite starting two years later.

Taniwha 4y ago
and yet it was a 32-bit core, vax class architecture, so unix was a relatively easy port. I think the really big problem with the 432 was all that hard wired microcode - rumor has it that it was buggy enough that subroutine calls could take over a millisecond (because they effectively called malloc() which in turn could trigger garbage collection) - stuff that's simply on say a 68k (push the next PC on the stack and jump) becomes a nightmare on a 432 if to fix a bug you need to spin the chip to change the microcode (to be fair at the time rammable microcode was all the rage, but it did take more area and you had to solve the booting problem). Anyway turning off the interrupts for a millisecond is a non starter for so many microcomputer applications ....

cduzz 4y ago

A mainframe style system is a couple of things that the x86 ecosystem is only recently started to get. Some of these (not every "mainframe" had every feature in this list) * nested virtualization -- anything can run inside anything inception style (IBM; maybe others) * smart peripherals -- hey storage get me this record! hey terminal send me the whole message when the user's done typing it out! (most of them) * binary abstraction -- your code is compiled by a bytecode of some sort that's dragged along to abstract decades of underlying hardware changes (IBM, burroughs, probably others) I think there's a bunch of stuff that's unique to unix that people just presume "this is the way" but since I'm mostly stuck in that universe I can't give a quick overview of all the wonky things that are totally alien to unix but totally normal to other systems.