4 May
2025
4 May
'25
6:48 a.m.
On Sat, May 03, 2025 at 11:29:14AM -0700, Al Kossow wrote:
Perhaps the Nu paper mentions an MMU?
Referenced by the SUN documents, but not available online.
S. A. Ward and C. J. Terman, "An approach to personal computing"
Proceedings of COMPCON, IEEE, February 1980, pp. 460-465.
IEEE doesn't have it online at
https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/1000109
The CHM has the proceedings:
https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102713995
CompCon80; VLSI: New Architectural Horizons; 1980.
--
"The one question mark for the CPU board design was the memory
management unit, to which Andy, Forest (who sent us a design while at
PARC), and I all made significant contributions."
Vaughan Pratt, in:
From the Valley of Heart's Delight to the Silicon Valley:
A Study of Stanford University's Role in the Transformation
Appendix A: The Founding of Sun Microsystems
http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/csl/tr/97/713/CSL-TR-97-713.ps
"So we switched to the 68000. I think we ended up with a 6810 as the
original processor. I designed a memory-mapping system for that
processor, which barely had the capabilities to do memory mapping. The
original SUN workstation had a really fascinating memory mapping system.
I was a little annoyed with Andy, because years later I discovered that
he had patented that memory mapping system."
Oral History of Forest Baskett, p 13
https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2017/12/102717243…
https://patents.google.com/patent/US4527232A/en
https://patents.google.com/patent/US4550368A/en
"John Seamons of Lucasfilm brought up Jim
Gula's MIT Nu Unix on the Sun.
We have an Ethernet based version of this Unix running at Stanford"
Vaughan Pratt on fa.works, Jan 1982
https://groups.google.com/g/fa.works/c/WHpSvlbG0A8/m/IUdSUIwJqAgJ
https://www.saildart.org/WORKS.MSG[UP,DOC]28
Since I've never seen the design for the original Nu 68K I wonder if
that was where the "SUN" segment/page MMU came from, since it looked
similar to what was in the CADR, and if the sniffing of the stack to
see if it needed to grow on function calls came from the Terman compiler.