From owner-freebsd-chat Thu May 21 01:34:56 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id BAA25610 for freebsd-chat-outgoing; Thu, 21 May 1998 01:34:56 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from time.cdrom.com (root@time.cdrom.com [204.216.27.226]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id BAA25581 for ; Thu, 21 May 1998 01:34:46 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from jkh@time.cdrom.com) Received: from time.cdrom.com (jkh@localhost.cdrom.com [127.0.0.1]) by time.cdrom.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id BAA24140; Thu, 21 May 1998 01:34:55 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from jkh@time.cdrom.com) To: Wes Peters cc: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: talk (fwd) In-reply-to: Your message of "Wed, 20 May 1998 22:30:41 MDT." <3563ADF1.D265F879@softweyr.com> Date: Thu, 21 May 1998 01:34:55 -0700 Message-ID: <24136.895739695@time.cdrom.com> From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org > The PC532 was an amazing development, you just don't see open hardware > like that anymore. IIRC, the PC523 grew out the 'net station' project, > were a bunch of hardware and software hackers on USENET were soliciting > attempts to make a new workstation architecture developed entired on > the net. Yeah, the way I heard it, Dave Rand and George Scolaro really really first and foremost wanted to use the machine as a UUCP feed master, which is why there are 10 serial ports on the motherboard of the PC532. :-) That machine was also responsible for teaching me Minix (where my sole contribution was a kernel task which ponged the 8 LEDs on the I/O port back and forth rather than simply run in the idle loop :) and really introducing me to the internals of forth. A friend and I ported an 8086 interpreter for fig-forth to ns32k assembly in one weekend (including all the disk and console I/O) and that's also probably the most fun I've ever had writing in assembly - the NS32K has a truly elegant instruction set that makes such programming enjoyable. I still have fond visions of getting NetBSD up on mine again and using it as a fancy console/modem/dialin server. Seems a shame to have all those nice serial ports go to waste. :) > We had the serial console, SCSI, and ethernet working and were able to > load code over the network using the AMD boot monitor, and were working > on the 4.3 BSD locore.s and task-switch when the PC532 was announced. > One of the group got a PC532 and everyone just stopped. It was mildly That's actually a pity considering that _we_ never got an ethernet solution working for ours (well, there was the SCSInet stuff, but it never really came to fruition) and that really limited its subsequent utility. :( - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message