My Interpro 2430 Works now !

From: Sipke de Wal <sipke_at_wxs.nl>
Date: Thu Aug 24 18:25:03 2000

Since about a month I am the proud owner of an Interpro 2430 with a
Kryptonite C400 ClipperCPU . It's a fully working system with a
21" Colordisplay, 32Mb RAM, 400MB SCSI HD, Ethernet, Floppy
and a double framebuffer. Tonight I got the beast up and running and
circumvented the root password. Yoooopiiii

But I have no manuals, no CD, or other valuable information.
I am currently rummaging through the filesystem, but it seems
to have been used as a plain user machine with some CAD-software.
No development stuff!

The Clipper C400 CPU is offspring from the (in)famous C100
Fairchild-Clipper. Eventually the C400 (kryptonite) was the last one made.
Intergraph Corporation (Ingr.) aquired the CPU from Fairchild and after
a few years that was the end of the story. AFAIK Ingr. moved to the
Windows NT platform and is no longer supporting the Clipper,
the hardware or CLIX (the Clipper port of UNIX).

The Clipper has a nice architecture though. I have a book (and a chipset)
of the C100. The book=> Clipper 32-bit Microprocessor - User Manual
(from Fairchild: ISBN 0-13-138058-3 025)

The Clipper is actually a chip set. One Chip contains the CPU & FPU and
 2 CAMMU chips which integrate a cache and a MMU. One of the CAMMU
chips serves the Instruction Queue, the other CAMMU is for data.
The CPU-FPU chip has 16 32-bit User registers, 16 32-Bit Supervisor
registers 8 64-Bit Floatingpoint registers, a Program and System statusword
and a Programcounter
The CAMMU's each contain a 4k byte 2-way associ. data or instr. cache, A
quadword (16-byte) linebuffer, that acts as a fast cache-within-the-cache,
and a Translation Lookaside Buffer that caches 128 freq. used virtual adress
translations. Not a lot by today's standards but cleverly executed.

The Clipper is rather special in that it has both RISC and CISC features.
The core is RISC but complex instructions are executed in an internal
macrocode. (kinda microcode of RISC primitives)

Software development on the Interpro systems is cumbersome and a
lot of the CLIX-features are outdated. It's also slow by today's norm
You can put some version of gcc on this system but you would need the
CLIX-libraries in order to execute your programs on the native Clipper.
These lib's are on the CD that accompanied the system.
..... But I don't have that CD

Alas, Linux or NetBSD would be nice. But Ingr is not forthcoming with the
systemdetails. So any one out there that could leverage some goodwill
on the side of Ingr. to part with Interpro, Clipper and CLIX secrets ........

...... might set of the first porting attempts!

Meanwhile a lot of these systems get scrapped and the Clipper heritage
slowly goes into the big void of remote history. It's rather ironical that
the system does not yet deserve the label of vintage computer because
it is not even 10 years old. The BIOS-productiondate on my system
reads 1994!

So if you feel as sad about this wastefull drama as I do .... Let's unite
and let us be heard of...

I will address these matters on this group in the near future and may
propose a mild flame towards Ingr. to persuade and petition them
to put more of their Clipper material in the public domain. But first
I need to learn more about these matters

I personally am not capable of porting anything since I am still busy
getting used to CLIX, UNIX, LINUX or whatever.

Reactions please ...........

Sipke de Wal
Received on Thu Aug 24 2000 - 18:25:03 BST