Hi
I used to work at HaL. I don't have any of the stuff
you need but I'll ask around. It is funny that when working
on some of the machines made by other people I can't understand
why they didn't save some of the information for future
use. Here I was working there and I don't think I saved
anything.
The HaL boxes were the first Sparc64's. Still they did
take a specialized OS. This was mainly for the I/O drivers.
The processors used in the early machines were some
of the first to use such things as out of order execution.
Basically, the processor would prefetch a number of
instructions ahead of time. If it saw an instruction that
didn't seem to have dependencies on previous results that
might not be available yet, it would execute them to fill,
otherwise, dead processor time. This was fine for most
everything but I/O and some process handshake in multitasked.
Someone forgot the I/O problem. I/O that needed to
be ordered had to have enough 'nop's inline so that the
next I/O was not in the prefetch. This required special
I/O routines, even though the machines were otherwise compatible
with other Sun code.
I don't even recall if the 330 was a R1 or a R2 processor.
I guess I can't blame others for losing computer history
when I'm part of the problem. I guess we should all make
efforts to save information as we go along. The hard
part is to recognize when we are at a significant point
in time.
Dwight
>From: "Dan Wright" <dtwright_at_uiuc.edu>
>
>I just picked up one of those today. I'm not sure of the date, but I think it
>might only be 7.5-8 yrs old, making it slightly OT...
>
>anyway, does anyone know anything about this box? All I've been able to find
>out so far is that it was the first marketed SPARC64 machine, it was
>technically very good, but was a total market failure. In other words, it's
>obscure and weird, perfect for a classiccmp find ;) It's a sun-compatible box
>-- I've fired it up with a serial console and I get a sun-ish OpenBoot prompt,
>etc.
>
>So, my question is, does anyone know more about this thing? Anyone have docs,
>OS media (if it won't run normal solaris...not sure), or anything?
>
>Thanks!
>
>- Dan Wright
>(dtwright_at_uiuc.edu)
>(http://www.uiuc.edu/~dtwright)
>
>-] ------------------------------ [-] -------------------------------- [-
>``Weave a circle round him thrice, / And close your eyes with holy dread,
> For he on honeydew hath fed, / and drunk the milk of Paradise.''
> Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan
>
Received on Tue May 28 2002 - 16:06:16 BST