NatSemi 32000 (Was: RE: Drop the Microsoft & OS Discussion!)

From: Derek Peschel <dpeschel_at_eskimo.com>
Date: Sat Oct 21 05:24:50 2000

> Anyone familiar with them? Do any significant assembly
> language programming on one?

No, but I can tell you about some cool hardware. (Unfortunately, I've never
seen it myself.)

First, there's the Ceres workstation designed at ETH Zurich by Miklaus Wirth
and his colleagues. They had been using another locally-designed machine
called the Lillith, running an OS written in Modula-2. (What else would you
expect from Wirth?). Byte had a small sidebar about the Lillith,
incidentally. It may have been in the famous Smalltalk issue, but I'm not
sure about that. Anyway, the ETH people decided to create a successor.
They made a new language (Oberon) and a new OS (also called Oberon).

The books _Project Oberon: the design of an operating system and compiler_
(by N. Wirth) and _The Oberon system: user guide and programmer's manual_
(by M. Reiser) cover the hardware, OS, and compiler in mostly complete
detail. The Oberon OS is still available on modern machines -- see the FAQ
for comp.lang.oberon. But the Ceres hardware is probably extinct.

Second, I believe Acorn made a 32016 "second processor" box for their BBC
Micro. Those boxes connect to the main machine (2MHz 6502) via a 2MHz bus
(the Tube) with a semi-custom chip (with a couple of FIFOs and some
registers) at each end. I believe the second processor has a stub OS in ROM
with entry points matching the ones in the main machine. The main OS knows
how to process calls from the Tube and how to download software to the Tube.
I thin the OS on the 32016 second processor was TRIPOS. I'm still sorting
out the conflicting docs -- one of them mentions UNIX but that might have
been scrapped.

-- Derek
Received on Sat Oct 21 2000 - 05:24:50 BST