Smalltalk (was Re: Treasure chest!)

From: Eric Smith <eric_at_brouhaha.com>
Date: Mon Oct 19 16:21:23 1998

D. Peschel" <dpeschel_at_u.washington.edu> wrote:
> BTW, someone mentioned that he had a Tektronix Magnolia. This was one of
> Tek's workstations of the 80's, and Tek's share of the porting effort was to
> put Smalltalk on the Magnolia. I would definitely like to find out more
> about THAT machine.

I'm not sure which machine the Magnolia is.

I've got a Tek 4406. The 4405 and 4406 were 68020-based version of the
earlier Tek 4404 (68010) workstation, which was intended for AI applications.
Tek offered Smalltalk and LISP.

Originally the 440x machines ran a Unix clone (Coherent?). But later they
switched to UTek, their own port of BSD 4.1. UTek requires a newer boot
rom, though the new rom can boot the old OS as well.

I don't have the LISP, but the Smalltalk is definitely based on the Xerox
ST80 image with some Tek improvements. And of course Tek wrote their
own virtual machine to run it.

The 440x have a SCSI interface to an external box containing SCSI-to-floppy
and SCSI-to-ST506 bridges. The SCSI-to-floppy bridge was actually
developed by Tek, although I've heard that some of the OEM bridges will
work. Unfortunately mine is broken.

I'm using an 88M Syquest in place of the original hard drive.

Since UTek is based on BSD 4.1, it doesn't understand IP subnetting.
Fortunately I have a router that can be configured to proxy ARP for
addresses outside the local subnet.

Cheers,
Eric
Received on Mon Oct 19 1998 - 16:21:23 BST