3 ms·

It was an nice little machine. But since it used the UCSD P-System, a slow interpreter, it was rather slow if you needed to compute anything. (In my aerospace

It was an nice little machine. But since it used the UCSD P-System, a slow interpreter, it was rather slow if you needed to compute anything. (In my aerospace company days, our group evaluated a large number of forgotten machines, from the Apollo Domain and Symbolics 3600 down to the Terak. This was the era of weird UNIX workstations and things that were sort of like IBM PCs, but different. So I got to see most of the hardware of that era. Eventually settled on Sun 2 machines and 4.3BSD.)

GregDavidson 2y ago
When the UC sold the UCSD P-System the profiler and native code compiler were abandoned. With P-Code optimized for size and hot spots native compiled, small P-System programs ran comparably to programs fully compiled to native code and large programs ran thousands of times faster by reducing (usually eliminating) swapping and paging on those early memory-starved systems. I too migrated to Sun-2s but I purchased them myself. I'd learned the hard way that software developers need to own the means of their production!
flopsamjetsam 2y ago
We had a lab of Apollos at our uni, in the "VLSI lab" (but used by everyone). We had one with a truly enormous (in depth) 17" or 19" colour monitor. I programmed some rudimentary 3d (flat shaded) on it, using some kind of direct screen buffer. I can't even remember if they ran X Windows. This would've been in the early 90s.
- neilv 2y ago
  The Apollos had their own Display Manager. (At least, by the time I saw them, as they were almost being discontinued, when they ran Domain/OS SR10.) It had a lot of neat things about it, including being ahead of its time and thinking behind Unix. But often people just used it to run a single program, and spend much time in the rest of the system.
neilv 2y ago
Did you get the full Unix 4.3BSD source code for the Sun-2, so you could hack on it? That would've been appealing. Otherwise, the Apollo series was (or became) more interesting, and the Symbolics (being a Lisp machine) must've been awesome.
- Animats 2y ago
  > Did you get the full Unix 4.3BSD source code for the Sun-2, so you could hack on it? Yes. We had an AT&T license for UNIX.

GregDavidson 2y ago

When the UC sold the UCSD P-System the profiler and native code compiler were abandoned. With P-Code optimized for size and hot spots native compiled, small P-System programs ran comparably to programs fully compiled to native code and large programs ran thousands of times faster by reducing (usually eliminating) swapping and paging on those early memory-starved systems. I too migrated to Sun-2s but I purchased them myself. I'd learned the hard way that software developers need to own the means of their production!

flopsamjetsam 2y ago

We had a lab of Apollos at our uni, in the "VLSI lab" (but used by everyone). We had one with a truly enormous (in depth) 17" or 19" colour monitor. I programmed some rudimentary 3d (flat shaded) on it, using some kind of direct screen buffer. I can't even remember if they ran X Windows. This would've been in the early 90s.

neilv 2y ago
The Apollos had their own Display Manager. (At least, by the time I saw them, as they were almost being discontinued, when they ran Domain/OS SR10.) It had a lot of neat things about it, including being ahead of its time and thinking behind Unix. But often people just used it to run a single program, and spend much time in the rest of the system.

neilv 2y ago

Did you get the full Unix 4.3BSD source code for the Sun-2, so you could hack on it? That would've been appealing. Otherwise, the Apollo series was (or became) more interesting, and the Symbolics (being a Lisp machine) must've been awesome.

Animats 2y ago
> Did you get the full Unix 4.3BSD source code for the Sun-2, so you could hack on it? Yes. We had an AT&T license for UNIX.