On Fri, 26 May 2000, John Foust wrote (to Tony Duell):
> Your beloved PERQ seems like a tremendous rarity to me. I've only
> seen one, in the 70's exhibit at SIGGRAPH 98, where I exhibited
> one of my Teraks. I do not recall anyone ever saying "Oh, there's
> a PERQ down on the loading dock in Trenton, NJ that's going to
> the Dumpster if no one grabs it by Friday."
Oddly, that's sort of what hapened to me. About 10 years ago when
looking for a UNIX box, I saw this largish machine with a 19" monitor
at a hamfest, but it had already been sold. However... I was given
the telephone number of a used computer warehouse where I could find
another PERQ. After driving there to purchase it, I was told that I'd
have to take away a second T2 chasis at no cost (that was going to be
scrapped) in order to be able to buy the other one.
To make a long story short, the above experience ended up with me
doing a lot of detective work to find out what a PERQ was; couldn't
find anyone who'd even heard of one (and that was 10 years ago!) for a
while, and eventually got through to Accent Systems in Pittsburgh, the
company that had been set up to support the PERQs after their demise,
then drove up to Pittsburgh to see what information I could obtain, as
well as getting a mouse (Kriz tablet)... ended up learning lots of
things not covered in the documentation, like how to format a disk and
install the POS and Accent operating systems, how to add a second
disk, etc... wow, I'm glad I took a notebook and pen with me! Also
obtained some maintenance floppies, etc. that allowed one to format
and install a hard disk, that were never part of the OS distributions,
which would probably have vanished into oblivion. Learned lots of
interesting PERQ history and trivia as well.
Fortunately, around that time, I'd learned of a couple of others who
had PERQs, and was able to notify them of this discovery (Accent
Systems) so they could also get bits for their PERQs; fortunately, one
of these people lived in Pittsburgh (if he's reading this, perhaps
he'll join in the conversation) and was able to rescue a lot more PERQ
stuff from Accent Systems than I could haul back here before it went
away, thus preserving much PERQ history; he also did a lot of research
into the PERQs and their history and is very knowlegeable about them.
Unfortunately, a _huge_ amount of the really good stuff went from
Accent to some company in Japan called Rikei (sp?) before we could
get any of it; never did find out what they wanted all those PERQs and
spare PERQ bits for; does anyone know?
All in all, the huge volumes of PERQ-related e-mail, the PERQ mailing
list and newsgroup, getting to visit Accent Systems and MegaScan (the
MegaScan monitor was a spinoff of PERQ Systems), talking with some
some of the PERQs creators, etc. was all great fun! ...not to mention
the interesting exercise of printing out the entire source code for
the POS operating system.
Back in the early 1990's, many people shared quite a bit of their PERQ
related knowledge and memories, which made for fascinating reading!
Then, there was the PERQ mailing list that someone (a co-conspirator
that I won't reveal the identity of - I don't think he was ever on
this list) set up, where we automagically subscribed everyone we had
the e-mail address of who was known to have knowledge of PERQs. That
resulted in the very interesting PERQ-Fanatics vs. CMU PERQ-haters
debate. :-) I know, we shouldn't have automagically subscribed all
those people to the list, but without doing so, some interesting bits
of history may have vanished into oblivion.
Had it not been for some hackers in the U.K., one very highly skilled
hardware hacker in particular - who may be reading this list and will
probably comment on this message :-), much of the information needed
for properly repairing and preserving PERQs would not be available -
much of it available to us only because of his efforts and hardware
knowledge, and had he and others not rescued some PERQ equipment that
I couldn't find a way to get shipped over here without spending a
fortune, more PERQ history would be lost.
Trivia question: does anyone know anything about a software program
called "Strawberry Fairchild and the Green Flame" that runs on any
other system? It's a work of surrealistic computer art that was
written for the PERQs by Dislocated Lady Software.
--
R. D. Davis
rdd_at_perqlogic.com
http://www.perqlogic.com/rdd
410-744-4900
Received on Fri May 26 2000 - 11:54:43 BST