21 Jan
2017
21 Jan
'17
3:42 p.m.
Control Data had a lab in Mississauga On, (outside of Toronto) in the 70s
and 80s where some of the CDC Cyber 180s were designed and built.
A company called HCR Corp in Toronto did a considerable amount of work for
CDC re-targeting pcc and UNIX System V for the 180s and ETA10.
I was fortunate enough to work for both companies. I didn't work on the pcc
port to the Cyber 180, but some of the UNIX port. I thought the Cyber 180
architecture was way ahead of it's time. Virtual memory, 64-bit ints,
shared libraries. Some of the 180s were also dual-state, NOS/VE 64-bit OS
and apps 50% of the time, a CPU microcode switch, to NOS and the 60-bit
platform for 50% of the time, to support NOS to NOS/VE migration. Pcc
re-targeting was challenging in a number of ways, addresses were 48 bits,
with a ring and segment number, which resulted in a NULL pointer actually
not being 0.
HCR also did work on the ETA10 UNIX port, I didn't participate on that
project, but HCR also re-targeted pcc for the Intel iWarp CPU, which I
worked on. HCR had a portable global code optimizer and peephole optimizer
for pcc, so much of the work involved splitting pcc, for the global
optimizer, to operate between front and back ends, and integrating the
peephole optimizer, re-targeting the code generator, and tuning.
A lot of very smart people who were great to work with at CDC and HCR,
certainly a great way to start my career.
Some more background here on the CYBERs
http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/cdc/cyber/cyber_180/
I seem to remember reading a number of those manuals 30 years ago or so.
And info on the iWarp project:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~iwarp/
On Sat, Jan 21, 2017 at 7:51 AM, Kay Parker <kayparker(a)mailite.com> wrote:
--
Kay Parker
kayparker(a)mailite.com
--
http://www.fastmail.com - Does exactly what it says on the tin
My memory of
the Kyber (as we called them; we had a 72)
wasn't it a CDC Cyber?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_Cyber
On Sat, Jan 21, 2017, at 04:38 AM, Dave Horsfall wrote:
On Thu, 19 Jan 2017, Steve Johnson wrote:
> PCC ended up being ported to many dozen different architectures, so
it's
> quite possible, but I don't recall it
being done. It was kind of a
> dinosaur by the early 70's. I'm not even sure that it had memory
> protection, and it certainly didn't have paging. And the I/O system
was
strange.
So porting Unix would have been next to impossible.
My memory of the Kyber (as we called them; we had a 72) was that it was
not character-addressable, but 60-bit word-addressable, thus making
string
handling somewhat difficult. Don't get me started on its utterly broken
architecture... I have thankfully lost my programming manual for the
beast.
The main thing I remember about the 6600 was that
it didn't have parity
bits on its memory. So people used to run the same program three times
and if two of the answers agreed, they published...
Parity only slowed it down, and besides, hardware never failed...
My fondest memory of the thing was its command completion; I would start
to type "O, TR" and it would fill out "O, TRANSACTION TERMINAL
STATUS".
Which reminds me that my worst memory was its console keyboard, with "0"
on the left...
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will
suffer."