My Interpro 2430 Works now !

From: Jay Jaeger <cube1_at_home.com>
Date: Sat Aug 26 15:50:42 2000

Yes, most Intergraph machines were used for computer assisted drafting
(CAD). The Unix (that they called CLIX) was a System V variant.

However, last I knew Intergraph still supported the hardware, though as you
point out, they are now entirely NT focused. (The history of Bentley
Microsystems and MicroStation is an interesting facet of Intergraph's
development. Anybody remember MicroIGDS? 8-) ).

Unfortunately, the media you need are copyrighted, so I cannot provide you
with any. But you might contact the Intergraph office nearest to you and
see if they could provide you with a copy of the core software -- part of
the CD wasn't encrypted by a license key. You may well get more
cooperation at the local level than trying to approach Intergraph at the
corporate level - flames are apt to be ignored.

Jay Jaeger

At 01:25 AM 8/25/00 +0200, Sipke de Wal wrote:
>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

---
Jay R. Jaeger The Computer Collection
cube1_at_home.com visit http://members.home.net/thecomputercollection
Received on Sat Aug 26 2000 - 15:50:42 BST

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