8 ms·

The PERQ Computer

183 points by mpweiher 2y ago

DonHopkins 2y ago
The predecessor to the "Blit" at Bell Labs was originally named the "Jerq" as a rude play on "Perq" borrowed by permission from Lucasfilm, and the slogan was "A Jerq at Every Desk". Blit (computer terminal): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blit_(computer_terminal) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blit_(computer_terminal) >The folk etymology for the Blit name is that it stands for Bell Labs Intelligent Terminal, and its creators have also joked that it actually stood for Bacon, Lettuce, and Interactive Tomato. However, Rob Pike's paper on the Blit explains that it was named after the second syllable of bit blit, a common name for the bit-block transfer operation that is fundamental to the terminal's graphics.[2] Its original nickname was Jerq, inspired by a joke used during a demo of a Three Rivers' PERQ graphic workstation and used with permission. https://inbox.vuxu.org/tuhs/CAKzdPgz37wwYfmHJ_7kZx_T=-zwNJ50PhS7r0kCpuf_F1mDkww@mail.gmail.com/ https://inbox.vuxu.org/tuhs/CAKzdPgz37wwYfmHJ_7kZx_T=-zwNJ50... From: Rob Pike <robpike@gmail.com> To: Norman Wilson <norman@oclsc.org> Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org> Subject: Re: [TUHS] Blit source Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2019 11:26:47 +1100 [thread overview] Message-ID: <CAKzdPgz37wwYfmHJ_7kZx_T=-zwNJ50PhS7r0kCpuf_F1mDkww@mail.gmail.com> (raw) In-Reply-To: <1576714621.27293.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 890 bytes --] Your naming isn't right, although the story otherwise is accurate. The Jerq was the original name for the 68K machines hand-made by Bart. The name, originally coined for a fun demo of the Three Rivers Perq by folks at Lucasfilm, was borrowed with permission by us but was considered unsuitable by Sam Morgan as we reached out to make some industrially, by a company (something Atlantic) on Long Island. So "Blit" was coined. The Blit name later stuck unofficially to the DMD-5620, which was made by Teletype and, after some upheavals, had a Western Electric BellMac 32000 CPU. If 5620s were called Jerqs, it was an accident. All the software with that name would be for the original, Locanthi-built and -designed 68K machines. The sequence is thus Jerq, Blit, DMD-5620. DMD stood for dot-mapped rather than bit-mapped, but I never understood why. It seemed a category error to me. -rob https://inbox.vuxu.org/tuhs/CAKzdPgxreqfTy+55qc3-Yx5zZPVVwOWoeMLCVFMaKoe0JOO3kw@mail.gmail.com/ https://inbox.vuxu.org/tuhs/CAKzdPgxreqfTy+55qc3-Yx5zZPVVwOW... The original name was Jerq, which was first the name given by friends at Lucasfilm to the Three Rivers PERQ workstations they had, for which the Pascal-written software and operating system were unsatisfactory. Bart Locanthi and I (with Greg Chesson and Dave Ditzel?) visited Lucasfilm in 1981 and we saw all the potential there with none of the realization. My personal aha was that, as on the Alto, only one thing could be running at a time and that was a profound limitation. When we began to design our answer to these problems a few weeks later, we called Lucasfilm to ask if they minded us borrowing their excellent rude name, and they readily agreed. Our slogan: A jerq at every desk.
jll29 2y ago
I was not aware that between Alto and Lisa there was the PERQ, a first commercial attempt, so thanks for point that out. Of course the deeper you dig anywhere, the more complexity gets unearthed, and the more fair credit must be distributed across more clever engineers, dilluting the "single genius" picture that movie makers and often sadly also journalists try to portray ("reality distortion field"). I would quite like a minimalistic b/w GUI as the PERQ had on the screen shot. Leaving out all the transparency/rounded corners nonsense this should be bleeding fast, too, with today's graphics capabilities. EDIT: typo fixed
- rjsw 2y ago
  There was the Lilith [1] too in the same timeframe. The PERQ and Lilith used AMD bitslice chips instead of the TI ones in the Alto. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilith_(computer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilith_(computer)
- lispm 2y ago
  Lisp Machines from LMI and Symbolics, too.
  - kragen 2y ago
    while those gave a lot of attention to usability and certainly had graphics and windows, i don't think they really belong to the smalltalk/perq/lisa/macintosh lineage; they were sort of a parallel development track with different, less graphical, less event-driven conventions
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      Maybe not the ones listed above, but Xerox PARC's Interlisp-D is another matter.
      - kragen 2y ago
        i feel like even interlisp-d, especially the 01970s version, has a pretty different style of interaction than smalltalk and the macintosh. i know a lot less about the perq
ggm 2y ago
I used one in the mid eighties, the SERC scattered them around British unis. The vertical hard drive had a wierd sparky engine when it spun, and it used graphics ram to compile so it scribbled over the display compiling C. I used it's animated icon tool "cedra" to make tintin's captain haddock blow smoke out his ears. We had the icl jv one. A beauty in reddish brown and cream. Made outside edinburgh near dalkeith I believe
- b112 2y ago
  The graphics ram use is a neat optimized use of ram.
  - zdw 2y ago
    There was a 3rd party software tool (the name of which I forget) that used the same graphics memory as scratch space trick when copying floppies on early 128k (and probably 512k) Macs. This reduced the number of swaps required to copy a 400k floppy.
  - pm215 2y ago
    I think it's more "we only have a megabyte of RAM, in some cases we'll just have to use the part the framebuffer is in". The Scavenger (its equivalent of the fsck filesystem checker) did the same thing.
- nxobject 2y ago
  IIRC it was part of a VLSI CAD initiative, right? But I may be getting my history mixed up.
  - ggm 2y ago
    Yes, that's my memory. No vlsi at york at the time, we worked on JANET coloured book protocols (me) and the ada compiler (other, far smarter people) and UNIX 32V (a very smart person) there
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
trebligdivad 2y ago
I scrounged one in ~1991 from the back corridors of Manchester Uni; fun machine; the CPU was a bitsliced type, common at the time using AMD chips, the microcode was loaded at boot (hence the different microcodes on the different OSs). It used a z80 on the IO board to get things started and load the microcode off disc. The UI on PNX was pretty nice as well for a machine with 1MB of RAM. My Perq 1, had it's 14" belt driven hard drive 27MB (early Seagate), with PNX on - try fitting a Unix system with a GUI on that these days!
mikewarot 2y ago
I have the strange feeling I'm going to end up seeing one of these today at the Midwest Vintage Computer Festival, though I've never heard of them before. Amazing stuff, thanks for sharing this! I'm glad they didn't start out with only 128 K of RAM, that would have sucked.
GeekyBear 2y ago
The Computer History Museum's long form interview with Avie Tevanian is a good resource for this era. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwCdKU9uYnE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwCdKU9uYnE
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Thanks you just increased my TODO list. :)
  - detourdog 2y ago
    It is a great interview. What I love about these stories is the revelation of the human effort to develop a threading system for I/O that is not an operating system, The all operating systems ride on top of the universal threading. Imagine all the human hours that stretches back decades trying to develop this single model of computing. I'm starting to believe that oral history and tradition is what moves the world along. All the written texts are transient. What we pass directly to each generation is our continuity of culture.
    - kragen 2y ago
      other prominent multithreaded cpus have included the lincoln lab tx-2 on which the first graphical interface was developed (with cad, constraint programming, and windows), the cdc 6600 'peripheral processor', the xerox alto, the tera mta, and the higher-end padauk microcontrollers including the pmc251, which cost 10½¢ https://www.lcsc.com/product-detail/Microcontroller-Units-MCUs-MPUs-SOCs_PADAUK-Tech-PMC251-S14_C317604.html https://www.lcsc.com/product-detail/Microcontroller-Units-MC... some current intel and amd parts also support 'hyperthreading', but as i understand it they sometimes run many instructions from the same thread sequentially, unlike the others mentioned above (except the padauk pmc251), and they are limited to 2 or 4 threads, again unlike the others mentioned except the pmc251 i'm a little unclear on the extent to which current gpu hardware supports this kind of every-clock-cycle alternation between different instruction streams; does anyone know?
      - 2y ago
avidphantasm 2y ago
Fascinating. I started undergrad at CMU in 1996 and immediately got jobs doing computer support. I came across many old Macs and even an old VAX from the 1980s, but had never heard of a PERQ. By then all the Andrew machines were either HP Apollos running HP-UX or Sun SPARCstation 4s and 5s running SunOS or early Solaris.
- rjsw 2y ago
  My feeling was that Andrew and SPICE were completely separate workstation projects at CMU, but only from using the software that came out of each of them.
  - eschaton 2y ago
    They were; their main point of connection was at the OS level, as Accent on PERQ begat Mach, and Andrew originally ran atop CMU’s Mach+BSD environment (MK+UX). That let it take advantage of features such as Mach IPC and dynamic loading of shared libraries and plug-in modules. Later Andrew was ported to vendor operating systems, and then to run atop X11 instead of wm.
  - markhahn 2y ago
    Not completely, but it wasn't a huge place, and the communities overlapped, went to some of the same seminars, etc. It was all in Wean, pretty much clustered by floor. Andrew was very much about distributed computing ala Athena; SPICE was more along workstation lines (and what was then called AI). As I recall, internet access (IMP, when /etc/hosts was exhaustive) was only the Vaxen and maybe some TOPS systems. I had access to a PERQ in about 1985, and it was running Pascal firmware - at the time, Pascal was the baseline language for CS courses. I seem to recall it had a tiling WM and a mouse about the size of a softball. There were Altos upstairs though I think they only acted as queues for the building's laser printers (which implemented some pre-PS page description language). But those were the days when 9600 baud was the norm...
- Isamu 2y ago
  The PERQs were on display at CMU around 1980, I remember seeing them in Science Hall (later Wean). Fun fact, the cpu board ran Pascal P-Code as a machine language. The cpu wasn’t a chip, they designed a board to execute P-Code directly.
pfdietz 2y ago
As part of the SPICE project there was an implementation of Lisp on the machines. This implementation became CMU Common Lisp. CMU Common Lisp is still available, but it also served as the jumping off point for Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) which is today the top free Common Lisp implementation. It's interesting there's a heritage of code stretching all the way back to these old machines, although of course the changes since then have been massive.
- fanf2 2y ago
  I like that Three Rivers refers to the geography of Pittsburgh. For a long time I did not know where SBCL got its name, until someone explained that Carnegie got his fortune from steel and Mellon ran a bank.
- lispm 2y ago
  Note also that Spice Lisp for The PERQ was also used to implement Hemlock, an EMACS editor. http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/perq/accent_S5/Accent_UsersManual_1984/05_Hemlock.pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/perq/accent_S5/Accent_UsersManu...
PaulHoule 2y ago
It is funny how the 1970s computer industry was much more geographically inclusive than it is today. Heck, even IBM alone was more geographically inclusive than the industry is today.
- kragen 2y ago
  shenzhen and tel aviv are further apart than boston and menlo park or do you mean that shenzhen is closer to taiwan than boston is to menlo park? i wouldn't dismiss the importance of intel, nvidia, micron, berkeley, stanford, asml, samsung, apple, etc., just yet
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    I would point to this forgotten book from the 1970s https://www.amazon.com/Dispersing-Population-America-Learn-Europe/dp/0815782144/ https://www.amazon.com/Dispersing-Population-America-Learn-E... which describes a nearly universal perception in Europe at the time that it was a problem that economic and cultural power is concentrated in cities like Paris and London. (It takes a different form in the US in that the US made a decision to put the capital in a place that wasn’t a major center just as most states the did the same; so it is not that people are resentful of Washington but rather a set that includes that, New York, Los Angeles and several other cities.) At that time there was more fear of getting bombed with H-Bombs but in the 1980s once you had Reagan and Thatcher and “globalization” there was very much a sense that countries had to reinforce their champion cities so they can compete against other champion cities so the “geographic inclusion” of Shenzhen and Tel Aviv is linked to the redlining of 98% of America and similar phenomena in those countries as well. It is not so compatible with a healthy democracy because the “left behind” vote so you get things like Brexit which are ultimately destructive but I’d blame the political system being incapable of an effective response for these occasional spams of anger.
    - kragen 2y ago
      interesting! i'm not quite sure what you're saying about reagan and shenzhen
layer8 2y ago
It’s fascinating to me how after forty years we are still piecing together that genealogy like it’s some ancient scriptures. And keeping it scattered in blog posts and forum threads like this one.
- kragen 2y ago
  i think 40 years ago it was pretty well-known; it's just the people it was well-known among were fairly few in number, because personal computers like the perq weren't yet a widespread cultural phenomenon. even well into the 90s, talking to your friends by typing text messages into a computer was still a 'geek' thing
Isamu 2y ago
A nit with TFA: the cpu board didn’t “emulate” P-Code, that was the native machine language. It was a “PASCAL machine” like the way we think of the Lisp Machine. So the cpu board was all logic chips implementing the P-Code machine language, it wasn’t a cpu chip with supporting logic. That gives you an idea of computing in the old days. Back in the day PASCAL was the main teaching language at CMU. (Edit) There seems to be some pushback on what I’m pointing out here, but it’s true, the cpu board is not built around a cpu chip, they built a microcode sequencer, ALU, etc to execute a p-code variant. You can read about it here: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/perq/PERQ_CPU_Tech_Ref.pdf http://bitsavers.org/pdf/perq/PERQ_CPU_Tech_Ref.pdf Schematics here: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/perq/perq1/PERQ1A_Schematics/03_CPU-D.pdf http://bitsavers.org/pdf/perq/perq1/PERQ1A_Schematics/03_CPU... Pic: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/perq/perq1/PERQ1A_PCB_Pics/CPU_top.jpg http://bitsavers.org/pdf/perq/perq1/PERQ1A_PCB_Pics/CPU_top....
- kragen 2y ago
  the cpu tech ref you linked documents a machine with 512 20-bit registers (256 architectural—they duplicated the register file to avoid using dual- or triple-ported memory, same as the cadr). p-code doesn't have registers. the microcode word format it documents uses 48-bit instructions. p-code instructions are typically about 8 bits wide. the cpu tech ref also doesn't mention pascal or p-code based on this it seems reasonable to continue believing that, as graydon says, it ran pascal via a p-code interpreter, but that that interpreter was implemented in microcode and i don't think it's accurate to say 'the cpu board was all logic chips implementing the p-code machine language'. the logic chips implemented microcode execution; the microcode implemented p-code i agree that this is the same extent to which lisp machines implemented lisp—but evidently the perq also ran cmucl, c, and fortran, so i don't think it's entirely accurate to describe it as 'a pascal machine'
  - Isamu 2y ago
    This is an interesting discussion, first it’s true that they implemented a p-code variant called q-code. Second I’m just making a distinction about what people refer to as emulation. Although you could change the microcode, that typically meant you had to reprogram the board. Microcode is typically inaccessible outside of the cpu. Microcode provides sub-operations within the cpu.
Lutzb 2y ago
There is some emulation available for the PERQ A1 in PERQemu https://github.com/jdersch/PERQemu/tree/master/PERQemu https://github.com/jdersch/PERQemu/tree/master/PERQemu Someone also added the PERQ A1 to Mame in 0.192, but as of now it is still marked as MACHINE_IS_SKELETON
WoodenChair 2y ago
Can someone who used one comment on what GUI elements were actually in a PERQ? I see windows and bitmap graphics in the screenshots I can find. But I don't see menus, a desktop, standardized buttons, scroll bars, etc. In other words I don't see the hallmarks of the Xerox Star, Apple Lisa, and Macintosh. It looks influenced by the Xerox products but not as advanced.
- kragen 2y ago
  you wouldn't see those in a screenshot of athena on x-windows circa 01994 either. the menus were all pop-up, so there was no menu bar, and the buttons weren't standardized or very recognizable (the xaw graphic design was abysmal, both aesthetically and usability-wise) the only reason my x-windows desktop at that time would have recognizable buttons was that at first i was running mwm, which was from motif, osf's ugly but comprehensible effort to fight off open look. later i switched to athena's twm (uglier still but customizable), then the much nicer olvwm, then fvwm, which was similarly comprehensible but looked good
mwnorman2 2y ago
We had at least 1 PERQ at the University of Waterloo in the early 1980's A friend of mine was helping the local IT folks set it up - arranging to read a 9" tape of PERQ's BitBlit software. A bunch of us wanted to see the machine first-hand but lowly undergrads didn't have access to the lab-room. But, wait ... is that acoustic tile above the door jam, only half-way across? Gimme a boost ... skinniest guy goes up and over ... we can SEE ;-)
jntun 2y ago
Excellently written history on a period of time I am fascinated in. However, I think the author puts too fine a point on the literal exact geographic position of the technology, and not the historical & material forces that manifested. Obviously every computer advancement didn't occur in sunny Palo Alto directly (just reading where your device was "assembled" will tell you that). But even this article trying to highlight the other places where all of this was going on; the author cannot be unburdened by the massive forces coming out of the Bay Area. This is most obvious when the author has to mention Xerox PARC but not interrogate _why_ Xerox chose that of all locations to let them start a "wild unsupervised west-coast lab". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmentation_Research_Center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmentation_Research_Center Very much a personal nitpick on a very well written entry so I hope this doesn't come off overly negative.
peter_d_sherman 2y ago
Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PERQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PERQ >"Processor The PERQ CPU was a microcoded discrete logic design, rather than a microprocessor. It was based around 74S181 bit-slice ALUs and an Am2910 microcode sequencer. The PERQ CPU was unusual in having 20-bit wide registers and a writable control store (WCS), allowing the microcode to be redefined.[4] The CPU had a microinstruction cycle period of 170 ns (5.88 MHz).[5]"
Animats 2y ago
Oh, the PERQ. I never saw one, although I came across most of the weird machines of that era. Lucasfilm bought a number of them. They were so unhappy with them that they ran a large display ad offering them for sale to get rid of them. There must be a story there, but I don't know it. Anyone remember PERQ at Lucasfilm?
nigwil_ 2y ago
screen capture of the present day PERQ emulator running a demo shown originally at SIGGRAPH 1982 https://imgur.com/gallery/3-rivers-computer-corporation-perq-workstation-from-1982-demo-Qfcn0kr https://imgur.com/gallery/3-rivers-computer-corporation-perq...
randomifcpfan 2y ago
I remember seeing the PERQ at trade shows. The best thing about the PERQ was its monitor, which was unusually sharp for that era. It used a yellow-white long persistence phosphor. A CMU grad student friend told me that the monitor designer was “a close personal friend of the electron”, implying that the analog circuitry of the PERQ monitor was especially high quality.
DonHopkins 2y ago
Chilton Computing: Single User Systems - Overview: https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acd/sus/ https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acd/sus/ PERQ Reference Manual: http://www.vonhagen.org/perqsystems/perq-cpu-ref.pdf http://www.vonhagen.org/perqsystems/perq-cpu-ref.pdf PERQ Workstations: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/perq/RD_Davis/Davis-PERQ_Workstations_Nov03.pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/perq/RD_Davis/Davis-PERQ_Workst... PERQ FAQ: http://www.vonhagen.org/perq-gen-faq.html http://www.vonhagen.org/perq-gen-faq.html PERQ History -- Overview: https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acd/sus/perq_history/ https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acd/sus/perq_history/ PERQ Publicity: https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acd/sus/perq_pr/ https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acd/sus/perq_pr/ PERQ System Users Short Guide: https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acd/pdfs/perq_p001.pdf https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acd/pdfs/perq_p001.pdf More PERQ notes (click "Further Reading" for more pages): https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acd/literature/notes/dic_notes_601_800.htm https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acd/literature/notes/di... PERQ Book: Contents: https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acd/literature/books/perq/ https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acd/literature/books/pe... 1. Perq System Users Short Guide 2. Perq files information 3. Editor Quick Guide Guide 4. Perq Pascal Extensions 5. Perq Pascal Extensions Addendum 6. Perq Hard Disk Primer 7. Perq Operating System Programmers Guide 8. Perq QCode Reference Manual 9. Perq Microprogrammers Guide 10. Perq Fault Dictionary 11. Installation Guide 12. New PERQ Tablet and Cursor Interface 13. System B.1 Stream Package 14. Changes to Pix in System B.1 15. Installation of POS Version B.1
cyberax 2y ago
https://bitsavers.org/pdf/perq/PERQ_Brochure.pdf https://bitsavers.org/pdf/perq/PERQ_Brochure.pdf - this has a price list for the computer. $19200 in 1980-s dollars. One option stands out: "Memory Parity Option - $500". Ahh... How the times don't change, with the ECC RAM being a premium feature.
- Taniwha 2y ago
  Probably a more obvious choice at the time we'd just gone through a point where the early releases of the latest memory generation (64k chips) had come with mysterious memory failures - eventually tracked down to natural alpha radiation from the ceramics used for packaging. We'd not long switch from core and semiconductor memory was still new

183 points by mpweiher 2y ago

The predecessor to the "Blit" at Bell Labs was originally named the "Jerq" as a rude play on "Perq" borrowed by permission from Lucasfilm, and the slogan was "A Jerq at Every Desk". Blit (computer terminal): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blit_(computer_terminal) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blit_(computer_terminal) >The folk etymology for the Blit name is that it stands for Bell Labs Intelligent Terminal, and its creators have also joked that it actually stood for Bacon, Lettuce, and Interactive Tomato. However, Rob Pike's paper on the Blit explains that it was named after the second syllable of bit blit, a common name for the bit-block transfer operation that is fundamental to the terminal's graphics.[2] Its original nickname was Jerq, inspired by a joke used during a demo of a Three Rivers' PERQ graphic workstation and used with permission. https://inbox.vuxu.org/tuhs/CAKzdPgz37wwYfmHJ_7kZx_T=-zwNJ50PhS7r0kCpuf_F1mDkww@mail.gmail.com/ https://inbox.vuxu.org/tuhs/CAKzdPgz37wwYfmHJ_7kZx_T=-zwNJ50... From: Rob Pike <robpike@gmail.com> To: Norman Wilson <norman@oclsc.org> Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org> Subject: Re: [TUHS] Blit source Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2019 11:26:47 +1100 [thread overview] Message-ID: <CAKzdPgz37wwYfmHJ_7kZx_T=-zwNJ50PhS7r0kCpuf_F1mDkww@mail.gmail.com> (raw) In-Reply-To: <1576714621.27293.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 890 bytes --] Your naming isn't right, although the story otherwise is accurate. The Jerq was the original name for the 68K machines hand-made by Bart. The name, originally coined for a fun demo of the Three Rivers Perq by folks at Lucasfilm, was borrowed with permission by us but was considered unsuitable by Sam Morgan as we reached out to make some industrially, by a company (something Atlantic) on Long Island. So "Blit" was coined. The Blit name later stuck unofficially to the DMD-5620, which was made by Teletype and, after some upheavals, had a Western Electric BellMac 32000 CPU. If 5620s were called Jerqs, it was an accident. All the software with that name would be for the original, Locanthi-built and -designed 68K machines. The sequence is thus Jerq, Blit, DMD-5620. DMD stood for dot-mapped rather than bit-mapped, but I never understood why. It seemed a category error to me. -rob https://inbox.vuxu.org/tuhs/CAKzdPgxreqfTy+55qc3-Yx5zZPVVwOWoeMLCVFMaKoe0JOO3kw@mail.gmail.com/ https://inbox.vuxu.org/tuhs/CAKzdPgxreqfTy+55qc3-Yx5zZPVVwOW... The original name was Jerq, which was first the name given by friends at Lucasfilm to the Three Rivers PERQ workstations they had, for which the Pascal-written software and operating system were unsatisfactory. Bart Locanthi and I (with Greg Chesson and Dave Ditzel?) visited Lucasfilm in 1981 and we saw all the potential there with none of the realization. My personal aha was that, as on the Alto, only one thing could be running at a time and that was a profound limitation. When we began to design our answer to these problems a few weeks later, we called Lucasfilm to ask if they minded us borrowing their excellent rude name, and they readily agreed. Our slogan: A jerq at every desk.

jll29 2y ago

I was not aware that between Alto and Lisa there was the PERQ, a first commercial attempt, so thanks for point that out. Of course the deeper you dig anywhere, the more complexity gets unearthed, and the more fair credit must be distributed across more clever engineers, dilluting the "single genius" picture that movie makers and often sadly also journalists try to portray ("reality distortion field"). I would quite like a minimalistic b/w GUI as the PERQ had on the screen shot. Leaving out all the transparency/rounded corners nonsense this should be bleeding fast, too, with today's graphics capabilities. EDIT: typo fixed

rjsw 2y ago
There was the Lilith [1] too in the same timeframe. The PERQ and Lilith used AMD bitslice chips instead of the TI ones in the Alto. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilith_(computer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilith_(computer)
lispm 2y ago
Lisp Machines from LMI and Symbolics, too.
- kragen 2y ago
  while those gave a lot of attention to usability and certainly had graphics and windows, i don't think they really belong to the smalltalk/perq/lisa/macintosh lineage; they were sort of a parallel development track with different, less graphical, less event-driven conventions
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Maybe not the ones listed above, but Xerox PARC's Interlisp-D is another matter.
    - kragen 2y ago
      i feel like even interlisp-d, especially the 01970s version, has a pretty different style of interaction than smalltalk and the macintosh. i know a lot less about the perq

ggm 2y ago

I used one in the mid eighties, the SERC scattered them around British unis. The vertical hard drive had a wierd sparky engine when it spun, and it used graphics ram to compile so it scribbled over the display compiling C. I used it's animated icon tool "cedra" to make tintin's captain haddock blow smoke out his ears. We had the icl jv one. A beauty in reddish brown and cream. Made outside edinburgh near dalkeith I believe

b112 2y ago
The graphics ram use is a neat optimized use of ram.
- zdw 2y ago
  There was a 3rd party software tool (the name of which I forget) that used the same graphics memory as scratch space trick when copying floppies on early 128k (and probably 512k) Macs. This reduced the number of swaps required to copy a 400k floppy.
- pm215 2y ago
  I think it's more "we only have a megabyte of RAM, in some cases we'll just have to use the part the framebuffer is in". The Scavenger (its equivalent of the fsck filesystem checker) did the same thing.
nxobject 2y ago
IIRC it was part of a VLSI CAD initiative, right? But I may be getting my history mixed up.
- ggm 2y ago
  Yes, that's my memory. No vlsi at york at the time, we worked on JANET coloured book protocols (me) and the ada compiler (other, far smarter people) and UNIX 32V (a very smart person) there

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trebligdivad 2y ago

I scrounged one in ~1991 from the back corridors of Manchester Uni; fun machine; the CPU was a bitsliced type, common at the time using AMD chips, the microcode was loaded at boot (hence the different microcodes on the different OSs). It used a z80 on the IO board to get things started and load the microcode off disc. The UI on PNX was pretty nice as well for a machine with 1MB of RAM. My Perq 1, had it's 14" belt driven hard drive 27MB (early Seagate), with PNX on - try fitting a Unix system with a GUI on that these days!

mikewarot 2y ago

I have the strange feeling I'm going to end up seeing one of these today at the Midwest Vintage Computer Festival, though I've never heard of them before. Amazing stuff, thanks for sharing this! I'm glad they didn't start out with only 128 K of RAM, that would have sucked.

GeekyBear 2y ago

The Computer History Museum's long form interview with Avie Tevanian is a good resource for this era. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwCdKU9uYnE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwCdKU9uYnE

pjmlp 2y ago
Thanks you just increased my TODO list. :)
- detourdog 2y ago
  It is a great interview. What I love about these stories is the revelation of the human effort to develop a threading system for I/O that is not an operating system, The all operating systems ride on top of the universal threading. Imagine all the human hours that stretches back decades trying to develop this single model of computing. I'm starting to believe that oral history and tradition is what moves the world along. All the written texts are transient. What we pass directly to each generation is our continuity of culture.
  - kragen 2y ago
    other prominent multithreaded cpus have included the lincoln lab tx-2 on which the first graphical interface was developed (with cad, constraint programming, and windows), the cdc 6600 'peripheral processor', the xerox alto, the tera mta, and the higher-end padauk microcontrollers including the pmc251, which cost 10½¢ https://www.lcsc.com/product-detail/Microcontroller-Units-MCUs-MPUs-SOCs_PADAUK-Tech-PMC251-S14_C317604.html https://www.lcsc.com/product-detail/Microcontroller-Units-MC... some current intel and amd parts also support 'hyperthreading', but as i understand it they sometimes run many instructions from the same thread sequentially, unlike the others mentioned above (except the padauk pmc251), and they are limited to 2 or 4 threads, again unlike the others mentioned except the pmc251 i'm a little unclear on the extent to which current gpu hardware supports this kind of every-clock-cycle alternation between different instruction streams; does anyone know?
    - 2y ago

avidphantasm 2y ago

Fascinating. I started undergrad at CMU in 1996 and immediately got jobs doing computer support. I came across many old Macs and even an old VAX from the 1980s, but had never heard of a PERQ. By then all the Andrew machines were either HP Apollos running HP-UX or Sun SPARCstation 4s and 5s running SunOS or early Solaris.

rjsw 2y ago
My feeling was that Andrew and SPICE were completely separate workstation projects at CMU, but only from using the software that came out of each of them.
- eschaton 2y ago
  They were; their main point of connection was at the OS level, as Accent on PERQ begat Mach, and Andrew originally ran atop CMU’s Mach+BSD environment (MK+UX). That let it take advantage of features such as Mach IPC and dynamic loading of shared libraries and plug-in modules. Later Andrew was ported to vendor operating systems, and then to run atop X11 instead of wm.
- markhahn 2y ago
  Not completely, but it wasn't a huge place, and the communities overlapped, went to some of the same seminars, etc. It was all in Wean, pretty much clustered by floor. Andrew was very much about distributed computing ala Athena; SPICE was more along workstation lines (and what was then called AI). As I recall, internet access (IMP, when /etc/hosts was exhaustive) was only the Vaxen and maybe some TOPS systems. I had access to a PERQ in about 1985, and it was running Pascal firmware - at the time, Pascal was the baseline language for CS courses. I seem to recall it had a tiling WM and a mouse about the size of a softball. There were Altos upstairs though I think they only acted as queues for the building's laser printers (which implemented some pre-PS page description language). But those were the days when 9600 baud was the norm...
Isamu 2y ago
The PERQs were on display at CMU around 1980, I remember seeing them in Science Hall (later Wean). Fun fact, the cpu board ran Pascal P-Code as a machine language. The cpu wasn’t a chip, they designed a board to execute P-Code directly.

pfdietz 2y ago

As part of the SPICE project there was an implementation of Lisp on the machines. This implementation became CMU Common Lisp. CMU Common Lisp is still available, but it also served as the jumping off point for Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) which is today the top free Common Lisp implementation. It's interesting there's a heritage of code stretching all the way back to these old machines, although of course the changes since then have been massive.

fanf2 2y ago
I like that Three Rivers refers to the geography of Pittsburgh. For a long time I did not know where SBCL got its name, until someone explained that Carnegie got his fortune from steel and Mellon ran a bank.
lispm 2y ago
Note also that Spice Lisp for The PERQ was also used to implement Hemlock, an EMACS editor. http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/perq/accent_S5/Accent_UsersManual_1984/05_Hemlock.pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/perq/accent_S5/Accent_UsersManu...

PaulHoule 2y ago

It is funny how the 1970s computer industry was much more geographically inclusive than it is today. Heck, even IBM alone was more geographically inclusive than the industry is today.

kragen 2y ago
shenzhen and tel aviv are further apart than boston and menlo park or do you mean that shenzhen is closer to taiwan than boston is to menlo park? i wouldn't dismiss the importance of intel, nvidia, micron, berkeley, stanford, asml, samsung, apple, etc., just yet
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  I would point to this forgotten book from the 1970s https://www.amazon.com/Dispersing-Population-America-Learn-Europe/dp/0815782144/ https://www.amazon.com/Dispersing-Population-America-Learn-E... which describes a nearly universal perception in Europe at the time that it was a problem that economic and cultural power is concentrated in cities like Paris and London. (It takes a different form in the US in that the US made a decision to put the capital in a place that wasn’t a major center just as most states the did the same; so it is not that people are resentful of Washington but rather a set that includes that, New York, Los Angeles and several other cities.) At that time there was more fear of getting bombed with H-Bombs but in the 1980s once you had Reagan and Thatcher and “globalization” there was very much a sense that countries had to reinforce their champion cities so they can compete against other champion cities so the “geographic inclusion” of Shenzhen and Tel Aviv is linked to the redlining of 98% of America and similar phenomena in those countries as well. It is not so compatible with a healthy democracy because the “left behind” vote so you get things like Brexit which are ultimately destructive but I’d blame the political system being incapable of an effective response for these occasional spams of anger.
  - kragen 2y ago
    interesting! i'm not quite sure what you're saying about reagan and shenzhen

layer8 2y ago

It’s fascinating to me how after forty years we are still piecing together that genealogy like it’s some ancient scriptures. And keeping it scattered in blog posts and forum threads like this one.

kragen 2y ago
i think 40 years ago it was pretty well-known; it's just the people it was well-known among were fairly few in number, because personal computers like the perq weren't yet a widespread cultural phenomenon. even well into the 90s, talking to your friends by typing text messages into a computer was still a 'geek' thing

Isamu 2y ago

A nit with TFA: the cpu board didn’t “emulate” P-Code, that was the native machine language. It was a “PASCAL machine” like the way we think of the Lisp Machine. So the cpu board was all logic chips implementing the P-Code machine language, it wasn’t a cpu chip with supporting logic. That gives you an idea of computing in the old days. Back in the day PASCAL was the main teaching language at CMU. (Edit) There seems to be some pushback on what I’m pointing out here, but it’s true, the cpu board is not built around a cpu chip, they built a microcode sequencer, ALU, etc to execute a p-code variant. You can read about it here: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/perq/PERQ_CPU_Tech_Ref.pdf http://bitsavers.org/pdf/perq/PERQ_CPU_Tech_Ref.pdf Schematics here: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/perq/perq1/PERQ1A_Schematics/03_CPU-D.pdf http://bitsavers.org/pdf/perq/perq1/PERQ1A_Schematics/03_CPU... Pic: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/perq/perq1/PERQ1A_PCB_Pics/CPU_top.jpg http://bitsavers.org/pdf/perq/perq1/PERQ1A_PCB_Pics/CPU_top....

kragen 2y ago
the cpu tech ref you linked documents a machine with 512 20-bit registers (256 architectural—they duplicated the register file to avoid using dual- or triple-ported memory, same as the cadr). p-code doesn't have registers. the microcode word format it documents uses 48-bit instructions. p-code instructions are typically about 8 bits wide. the cpu tech ref also doesn't mention pascal or p-code based on this it seems reasonable to continue believing that, as graydon says, it ran pascal via a p-code interpreter, but that that interpreter was implemented in microcode and i don't think it's accurate to say 'the cpu board was all logic chips implementing the p-code machine language'. the logic chips implemented microcode execution; the microcode implemented p-code i agree that this is the same extent to which lisp machines implemented lisp—but evidently the perq also ran cmucl, c, and fortran, so i don't think it's entirely accurate to describe it as 'a pascal machine'
- Isamu 2y ago
  This is an interesting discussion, first it’s true that they implemented a p-code variant called q-code. Second I’m just making a distinction about what people refer to as emulation. Although you could change the microcode, that typically meant you had to reprogram the board. Microcode is typically inaccessible outside of the cpu. Microcode provides sub-operations within the cpu.

Lutzb 2y ago

There is some emulation available for the PERQ A1 in PERQemu https://github.com/jdersch/PERQemu/tree/master/PERQemu https://github.com/jdersch/PERQemu/tree/master/PERQemu Someone also added the PERQ A1 to Mame in 0.192, but as of now it is still marked as MACHINE_IS_SKELETON

WoodenChair 2y ago

Can someone who used one comment on what GUI elements were actually in a PERQ? I see windows and bitmap graphics in the screenshots I can find. But I don't see menus, a desktop, standardized buttons, scroll bars, etc. In other words I don't see the hallmarks of the Xerox Star, Apple Lisa, and Macintosh. It looks influenced by the Xerox products but not as advanced.

kragen 2y ago
you wouldn't see those in a screenshot of athena on x-windows circa 01994 either. the menus were all pop-up, so there was no menu bar, and the buttons weren't standardized or very recognizable (the xaw graphic design was abysmal, both aesthetically and usability-wise) the only reason my x-windows desktop at that time would have recognizable buttons was that at first i was running mwm, which was from motif, osf's ugly but comprehensible effort to fight off open look. later i switched to athena's twm (uglier still but customizable), then the much nicer olvwm, then fvwm, which was similarly comprehensible but looked good

mwnorman2 2y ago

We had at least 1 PERQ at the University of Waterloo in the early 1980's A friend of mine was helping the local IT folks set it up - arranging to read a 9" tape of PERQ's BitBlit software. A bunch of us wanted to see the machine first-hand but lowly undergrads didn't have access to the lab-room. But, wait ... is that acoustic tile above the door jam, only half-way across? Gimme a boost ... skinniest guy goes up and over ... we can SEE ;-)

jntun 2y ago

Excellently written history on a period of time I am fascinated in. However, I think the author puts too fine a point on the literal exact geographic position of the technology, and not the historical & material forces that manifested. Obviously every computer advancement didn't occur in sunny Palo Alto directly (just reading where your device was "assembled" will tell you that). But even this article trying to highlight the other places where all of this was going on; the author cannot be unburdened by the massive forces coming out of the Bay Area. This is most obvious when the author has to mention Xerox PARC but not interrogate _why_ Xerox chose that of all locations to let them start a "wild unsupervised west-coast lab". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmentation_Research_Center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmentation_Research_Center Very much a personal nitpick on a very well written entry so I hope this doesn't come off overly negative.

peter_d_sherman 2y ago

Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PERQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PERQ >"Processor The PERQ CPU was a microcoded discrete logic design, rather than a microprocessor. It was based around 74S181 bit-slice ALUs and an Am2910 microcode sequencer. The PERQ CPU was unusual in having 20-bit wide registers and a writable control store (WCS), allowing the microcode to be redefined.[4] The CPU had a microinstruction cycle period of 170 ns (5.88 MHz).[5]"

Animats 2y ago

Oh, the PERQ. I never saw one, although I came across most of the weird machines of that era. Lucasfilm bought a number of them. They were so unhappy with them that they ran a large display ad offering them for sale to get rid of them. There must be a story there, but I don't know it. Anyone remember PERQ at Lucasfilm?

nigwil_ 2y ago

screen capture of the present day PERQ emulator running a demo shown originally at SIGGRAPH 1982 https://imgur.com/gallery/3-rivers-computer-corporation-perq-workstation-from-1982-demo-Qfcn0kr https://imgur.com/gallery/3-rivers-computer-corporation-perq...

randomifcpfan 2y ago

I remember seeing the PERQ at trade shows. The best thing about the PERQ was its monitor, which was unusually sharp for that era. It used a yellow-white long persistence phosphor. A CMU grad student friend told me that the monitor designer was “a close personal friend of the electron”, implying that the analog circuitry of the PERQ monitor was especially high quality.

DonHopkins 2y ago

Chilton Computing: Single User Systems - Overview: https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acd/sus/ https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acd/sus/ PERQ Reference Manual: http://www.vonhagen.org/perqsystems/perq-cpu-ref.pdf http://www.vonhagen.org/perqsystems/perq-cpu-ref.pdf PERQ Workstations: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/perq/RD_Davis/Davis-PERQ_Workstations_Nov03.pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/perq/RD_Davis/Davis-PERQ_Workst... PERQ FAQ: http://www.vonhagen.org/perq-gen-faq.html http://www.vonhagen.org/perq-gen-faq.html PERQ History -- Overview: https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acd/sus/perq_history/ https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acd/sus/perq_history/ PERQ Publicity: https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acd/sus/perq_pr/ https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acd/sus/perq_pr/ PERQ System Users Short Guide: https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acd/pdfs/perq_p001.pdf https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acd/pdfs/perq_p001.pdf More PERQ notes (click "Further Reading" for more pages): https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acd/literature/notes/dic_notes_601_800.htm https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acd/literature/notes/di... PERQ Book: Contents: https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acd/literature/books/perq/ https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acd/literature/books/pe... 1. Perq System Users Short Guide 2. Perq files information 3. Editor Quick Guide Guide 4. Perq Pascal Extensions 5. Perq Pascal Extensions Addendum 6. Perq Hard Disk Primer 7. Perq Operating System Programmers Guide 8. Perq QCode Reference Manual 9. Perq Microprogrammers Guide 10. Perq Fault Dictionary 11. Installation Guide 12. New PERQ Tablet and Cursor Interface 13. System B.1 Stream Package 14. Changes to Pix in System B.1 15. Installation of POS Version B.1

cyberax 2y ago

https://bitsavers.org/pdf/perq/PERQ_Brochure.pdf https://bitsavers.org/pdf/perq/PERQ_Brochure.pdf - this has a price list for the computer. $19200 in 1980-s dollars. One option stands out: "Memory Parity Option - $500". Ahh... How the times don't change, with the ECC RAM being a premium feature.

Taniwha 2y ago
Probably a more obvious choice at the time we'd just gone through a point where the early releases of the latest memory generation (64k chips) had come with mysterious memory failures - eventually tracked down to natural alpha radiation from the ceramics used for packaging. We'd not long switch from core and semiconductor memory was still new