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Date: Fri, 16 Jul 1999 13:28:52 +0200
From: Michael Elbel <Michael.Elbel@consol.de>
To: ni@tellique.de
Cc: chat@freebsd.org, garyj@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: IA64
Message-ID: <19990716132849.A36231@consol.de>
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In lists.freebsd.chat you write:

>Michael Elbel wrote on freebsd-chat:

>> Well, all I can say is that in a former life at a former company we
>> were indeed building workstations with i860 processors and only
>> those. Intel *themselves* supplied a SYSVR4 port to the i860 that we
>> used as the base of our own version.

> I hope I am not giving you away when I mention that this must have been
> the Cadmus Firebox, the only general-purpose machine based on the i860 I
> have ever heard about.

Nah. I remember the time at PCS quite fondly. Even Jordan Hubbard used to
work there for a couple of years. Even without the its name not working
quite so well in English, the Firebox was pretty doomed from pretty early
on due to Intel not supporting the i860 in a way that would help to
establish it better. They were very slow fixing stuff with the processor
itself and at the time the first machine was sellable (with somewhat
stable processor steppings and the necessary workarounds for the rest of
the bugs we knew of) HP had their snakes out with comparable FP
performance and better processor support for general purpose tasks. PCS
never managed to sell any substantial number of boxes.

> At that time, I had a bet running with a >friend of mine -- he said that
> at latest at the end of the second year >after that one ('92 sounds
> right, so we targeted end of '94) there >would be cheap i860 workstations
> at less than DEM 30000(*). The >Firebox sold for more than twice as much.

>(*) something between USD 15000 and 20000 at the time

>He not only lost the bet, but could not name a *single* other i860
>workstation. That made for a fine carton of champagne, which we emptied
>together (and with some friends).

Yeah I remember that there was somebody like Convex (was it Convex, Gary)
who were interested in OEMing the Fireboxes as workstation type boxes
together with their own multiprocessor i860 machines.

>> I believe that Gary Jennejohn still uses one of the beasts as an X
>> terminal.

>Cool. Does anybody have one for sale? :-)

Good question. Myself, I never owned one. Gary might know.

Michael

-- 
\|/
-O- Michael Elbel, ConSol* GmbH, - me@consol.de - 089 / 45841-256
/|\ Fermentation fault (coors dumped)


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