8 Oct
2017
8 Oct
'17
6:51 p.m.
* Alan Nemeth - apparently the designer of the BBN C-series mini’s (I think the C30 was
designed to replace the 316/516 as IMP). It is hard to find any info on the C-series, but
I understand it to be a mini with 10 bit bytes, 20 bit words and 20 bit address space,
more or less modeled after the PDP11 and an instruction set optimised to be an easy target
for the C compilers of the day. Any other links to Unix?
The C machine was a generic emulation box if I recall properly. The C-30 was indeed an
attempt to emulate the 316/516 for IMPS/TACS. In BBNs long history of selling the same
thing to the government over and over, they tweaked the firmware with the goal of
allegedly coming up with the perfect instruction set for running C programs and dubbed
that model the C- 70. I had use of a few in the Army. They were kind of
"meh" processors and frankly, I don't recall them running a BSD-ish version
of UNIX.
* Dan Lynch - ISI program manager for TCP/IP and the switch-over from NCP on Arpanet.
And eventually running the Interop TCP/IP promotion organization.
* Gerald Popek - worked on a secure version of (Arpanet enabled) Unix and on distributed
systems (LOCUS) at the time.
Next to networking, the link between these people
seems to have been distributed computing — yet I don’t think 4.2BSD had a goal of being
multiprocessor ready.
But it wasn't particularly ill suited for that. George Gobels had little problem
getting the dual-vax running. We ported 4.2 to the MIMD HEP early on as well. All of
these worked fine as long as you guaranteed that no more than one processor went into the
core kernel at one time. It didn't always need to be the same CPU, but just that
you didn't have concurrency. The HEP and a later product I worked on with four
i860 processors, the kernel would bounce around among the different processors.