3 May
2025
3 May
'25
7:14 p.m.
On 5/3/25 12:01 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
There were a couple of solutions, but they were all
similar, which might be challenging to figure out now. The first gen of the the micros
needed an external MMU and by the time of the Z8000/68K family/NS16032/and even the Intel
devices were already several different MMU from
mini's and mainframes which the different microprocessor MMU swiped different ideas
and added a few other there own (particular to them). I
think poking around the Asilimor Workshop Archives is likely to be the most fruitful. I
would love to find a copy of Forest Basket's paper
where he proposed using 2 68000's as 'executor' and 'fixer' as
Apollo and Masscomp would do [many of those were from Asilomar - Forest's
was]. Yale Patt and a few of his students had a few MMU papers for some of the chips
around that time, IIRC. Sadly, my copies of that
stuff from a few of those Asilomar conferences were lost.
I hope the scanning and preservation efforts of the past 20 years continues.
As a naive engineer coming to the Valley in 1984 with my only prior exposure
being Usenet, the degree of tribal knowledge and interconnectedness took
a while to realize. I'm still learning things, for example what is coming
to light here, even after working at the Computer History Museum for almost
20 years now along with realizing how much of Valley folklore we don't have
in our archives.