Researchers create laser light interconnects on silicon

56K is a lot of core - wasn't it all hand knitted back then by ladies with tweezers?

.. ..

I guess I'd forgotten (if I ever knew) that PDP-11s had an MMU. The only ones I used were in the Tektronix systems. The last one I bought had a /45 (or was it a /44?) in it. I later bought a VAX

11/780 via Fairchild to run our test floor.

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  Keith

It was a lot of anything in '76/77. The core came in handy though, I didn't have a hard disk at first and only had a dual 8" floppy drive. One could halt the system and power it off. The next day just power it back on and hit the run switch.

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  Keith

Which 68k's? I am doing more and more work with ColdFires these days, which are 68k at heart.

MC68332. They still make them, and tell me that demand is still strong and that they are soliciting new business. We'll probably cut over to Coldfire some day... it has 10x or so times the horsepower. But it seems like, when we need some hard number crunching, we just stuff that bit into a Xilinx chip. I worked out a DAC calibration equation, a table lookup, a couple of adds, a multiply and a divide, and one of my guys said "oh, I'll just do that for you in the FPGA."

The 68332's 32:64 mul/div operations are great.

John

I wouldn't call it knitting. It's more like macrame. I never got to watch them work. They were quite protective of their area. Males were not able to do this work. I think there's a name for the tool used. It wasn't tweezers and field service used it to fix hardware bugs.

/BAH

I'm very fond of the 68332 myself - we have used them as a high-end microcontroller for over a decade. Motorola (then Freescale) tried for years to persuade customers to move to more modern devices, but they remain ever-popular. If you are looking for a step up, go for the MCF5234 - it is 10-20 times faster, supports more memory, has a faster and more powerful TPU, ethernet, CAN, and other useful goodies, but is still very familiar to a 68332 expert.

John Lark> They glued individual compound-semiconductor lasers on top of a

As I understand, even the attaching of non-silicon devices onto a silicon substrate poses technical challenges and materials-compatibility issues. Wish I knew more about it to explain better, but that is what I recall from what I have read.

Agreed that it has yet to merit front-page headlines, but I'm surprised by the disdain shown by some towards any technological news that does not pertain to a final product that can be purchased right now.

Mark

Thermal coefficient of expansion, for one.

Perhaps because we've seen the same or similar claims far too often? Pehaps because of the absurd extrapolations? Nah, it'll make your laptop run cooler and your Internet connection faster.

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  Keith

Many, many headlines marveled over how this Intel breakthrough is going to change the world. Not one mentioned that Intel just dumped their electro-optics business for about 5% of what it cost them. Not even Intel has faith in this!

John

Sorry for the delay. I could not recall the name and had to ask. Mentec. Note that my statement was second-hand information. You need to verify.

But do they suck?

/BAH

Ah, for some strange reason RSTS didn't get along with me. It's possible that we had an awful combination of software bits. I never had the time to figure that mystery out.

I doubt it although I no longer remember who worked on what and when they did work on it. The similarity among DEC's OSes is because the same people moved from one software (usually monitor) project to another project. They also drank beer at the bar across the street. So one good idea developed in one monitor would either be carried to the next monitor project or told to the guy working on another monitor. Then he would carry the bits, if possible, or the idea to that monitor. That's how TECO ended up on all systems. It was the most efficient editor that we used.

In addition, the same group typed all the documentation for all systems (I was there). Thus, by trail and error, a common standard of documentation formats and usage were evolved. DEC was known for its thorough and excellent documentation.

'79 is a lot later. I was thinking of when the 11/70 was first shipped. I don't remember seeing any laying around in '75.

/BAH

RSTS was very reliable, and very productive, for us. I wrote N/C compilers and cross-assemblers and all sorts of engineering apps in BASIC-PLUS. It was the associated big-Unibus systems that tended to be flakey... the Unibus was a nasty heap of mismatched transmission lines and wirewrap backplanes. RSTS just used it hard.

Sorry, I meant PC-DOS. Most of the early micro os's, like CPM and such, pretty much resembled PDP-11 DOS and RT11.

John

Nope. The 68332 is a solid machine, a pleasure to design with and program.

John

And resembled OS-8. IAS was the best PDP-11 OS, from my limited usage.

/BAH

If you were talking 1965 it would be 512 16-bit words. In 1968 i got to visit a core memory manufacturer and they had 4k 32-bit words about the size of a paperback, the drive electronics was about 2 to 3 times as big. By 1975 i was working on computers with 64K 32-bit words in a module not much bigger than my fist, and the drive electronics was about 2 X the size of the core module. Of course heat extraction is becoming a problem at this point.

--
 JosephKK
 Gegen dummheit kampfen die Gotter Selbst, vergebens.  
  --Schiller

If you still have it you should consider making a copy for a computer museum.

--
 JosephKK
 Gegen dummheit kampfen die Gotter Selbst, vergebens.  
  --Schiller

Actually by 1968 they had invented machines that could do it better than humans. Of course with core sizes shrinking to reduce switching energy and thus power, it was getting nigh impossible for humans to do anymore.

--
 JosephKK
 Gegen dummheit kampfen die Gotter Selbst, vergebens.  
  --Schiller