Terak Museum

Post by Animats » Thu, Apr 17, 2025, 2:57 AM UTC

neilv wrote: post #10

Animats wrote: post #4

It was an nice little machine. But since it used the UCSD P-System, a slow interpreter, it was rather slow if you needed to compute anything. (In my aerospace company days, our group evaluated a large number of forgotten machines, from the Apollo Domain and Symbolics 3600 down to the Terak. This was the era of weird UNIX workstations and things that were sort of like IBM PCs, but different. So I got to see most of th…

Did you get the full Unix 4.3BSD source code for the Sun-2, so you could hack on it? That would've been appealing. Otherwise, the Apollo series was (or became) more interesting, and the Symbolics (being a Lisp machine) must've been awesome.

> Did you get the full Unix 4.3BSD source code for the Sun-2, so you could hack on it?

Yes. We had an AT&T license for UNIX.

Post by GregDavidson » Sat, Apr 19, 2025, 8:20 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #4

It was an nice little machine. But since it used the UCSD P-System, a slow interpreter, it was rather slow if you needed to compute anything. (In my aerospace company days, our group evaluated a large number of forgotten machines, from the Apollo Domain and Symbolics 3600 down to the Terak. This was the era of weird UNIX workstations and things that were sort of like IBM PCs, but different. So I got to see most of th…

When the UC sold the UCSD P-System the profiler and native code compiler were abandoned. With P-Code optimized for size and hot spots native compiled, small P-System programs ran comparably to programs fully compiled to native code and large programs ran thousands of times faster by reducing (usually eliminating) swapping and paging on those early memory-starved systems. I too migrated to Sun-2s but I purchased them myself. I'd learned the hard way that software developers need to own the means of their production!

Re: Terak Museum

Re: Terak Museum