151–160 of 163 posts
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It was probably not dramatic if it was slower at all, there is a reason so many of those workstation processors died out in the 90s.
Well, with a performance of ~22-25 MIPS, PRISM@18Mhz was about 2.5 times faster than original 25Mhz 486DX and roughly on par with 1992 486DX2 66Mhz.
The UK government ran an initiative in the mid 1980s to get electronics CAD into every university and polytechnic. The institution I worked for got a lab of DN300 and DN500 workstations running various digital and SPICE-based tools. We used them for undergrad classes and also for some consultancy projects. They felt like a huge leap to us. To put it in perspective, our other labs at the time were either CP/M or mainf…
In retrospect, did you think this initiative worked?
There was a ton of high integration semi innovation coming out of UK in eighties, on par with Japanese.
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You and me both! When I see something like "a blue whale can be nearly 100 feet (30.48m) long", I want to throw a math book at the author. "Nearly 100 feet" is "nearly 30 meters". "About $250K" is "about $660K today" at best.
It's almost like everyone should just adopt the system of units and measurements that makes the most sense and is used by the very, VERY vast majority of the world.
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Yes, MAME emulates the DN3500 era hardware mostly acceptably. Setup instructions are available online but reference MESS since they were written before MESS was merged back into MAME.
I need to find those. And get a more powerful workstation.
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It's almost like everyone should just adopt the system of units and measurements that makes the most sense and is used by the very, VERY vast majority of the world.
Also true but not relevant here. That original example of overly precise dollar amounts would still be an issue. The root cause isn’t units, but innumeracy.
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I at first thought a 486 was probably faster, but that Apollo CPU has 64 bit data path apparently. It might have been a beast. I didn't even know Apollo used anything but Motorola 68k CPUs.
I wonder if it might have been a beast at some tasks, but not others? I imagine these chips might have been optimized for throughput on well-suited and carefully tuned programs, where the compilers could be convinced to put out good code (since it was apparently something like a VLIW).
Domain OS was a multiuser, multitasking OS running on a Motorola 68020 with 4 Megs of RAM with distributed filesystem and diskless clients which did swap over the network. Ah, and with versioning filesystem. And Spice simulations were resonably fast compared to a 386/40 running Pspice on MS-DOS.
I managed to get an Apollo on auction while working at ncd in the early-mid 90’s, mine had a very high res black and white monitor and a very weird Unix implementation that appeared to let you choose between bsd and AT&T environments at boot. Mostly I remember it for the amazing monitor and the laser mouse and the mirrored mouse pad with the grid - truly amazing to me at the time.
Some of the first computer based PCB design work took place with Apollo/Mentor graphics. I'm really curious what the user experience was like but can't find any information.
The GUI was the best marriage between a TUI and a GUI. You had on the keyboard a holder with all the functional keys for your program (DM, Spice, etc). I really miss such a thing today.
Anybody else remember the Apollo/Domain clock bug that made us reset the time and date: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34370897 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34029638 Just to clarify, the DN10000 PRISM processor was apparently not subject to it.
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I was too late to the party for the BP6... I was however lucky enough to be able to get a Tyan Tiger MPX alongside a couple of 'Morgan' core Durons... Can't remember if they were 1.0 or 1.2GHZ... But wow that thing was -nice- on Windows 2000 and held up better than most than other systems I built in that era (Although, in retrospect that may have been because most other builds I did suffered from the capacitor plague…
This does look like an interesting board https://www.tyan.com/Motherboards_S2466_Tiger%20MPX
The -intended- purpose was Dual Athlon MPs.
That said, AFAIK some early AXPs could be used, many later ones could have the bridges 'repaired' to allow dual operation.
Early Morgan core (Model 7) Durons however could also run MP.
One big pain point however, the built in USB was broken on early revs (but hey, they bundled a PCI USB2.0 card to compensate) but also the chipset was... -meh-.
But wow it was a solid board!