Stolen designs

What ever happened to the 432? All I ever got was the books.

Check out cars as well. After starting ouit different, stuff like pedals were standardized very quickly. Som thing stook longer, but the wiper hasn't always been on the right in every car.

Thomas

seen

layouts

Both

be

device.

My family has 5 cars. I have to sit and think for a while when I get in one for things like parking brake release, seat adjustment, lights, wipers, shifter --- no standards apparently.

And the worst is getting into a rental car at night when it is raining and the rear window is fogged up.

I think those were legal copies. The feds wanted more scopes than Tek could comfortably make. Of course the copies didnt have a lot of the Tek quality details, but as usual the govt didnt care. Same thing happened with the Collisn R-390A radios, which were farmed out to many builders, including Helena Rubenstein.

As another example, there seem to be a bazillion mil-spec test leads for sale. They seem to meet a whole slew of requirements-- foil-packed, many many replaceable test prods, good insulation. Every requirement, except that they be usable: the probe ends tend to unscrew themselves-- the alligator clips are too strongly sprung for normal fingers, and the probe handles are hard to hold and too heavy. Lots of specs met, except the useful ones.

Lavoie, I think. Somebody else, Hickock maybe, made Tek clone plugins, too.

John

They told me they were still out soliciting new business for the 332. Why don't they just move it to a newer process? It's not that complex by modern standards, and they wouldn't have to touch the microcode.

Yes (grumble, snarl) I guess we'll have to do that one of these days. We could use a little more speed now and then.

John

Intel is a notoriously agressive company, internally as well as to vendors and customers.

John

Ain't that the truth!

Particularly those items I have no familiarity with, like defrosters ;-)

Had an unfamiliar event happen in my own car this weekend.

Drove to San Diego to visit a granddaughter having spinal fusion surgery.

On the way back it seemed to be getting hot in the car, so I manually turned up the blower speed... no increase in air flow.

Finally dawned on me that San Diego is humid.

Opened up the circulation to outside air and blew snow out the vents ;-)

Then I ran over a piece of tread, from a truck tire, at 100MPH, just east of Gila Bend on I8.

Not much choice, semi on my right, guard rail on the left :-(

Doesn't appear to have damaged anything... the Q45 has a nice skid plate under the engine and tranny.

...Jim Thompson

The 432 and the HP thing (3000 series) were sort of the pinnacle of CISC microcoding, insanely macro instructions that did stuff like polynomial expansion, threaded-list maintenance, frame management, all that stuff. They turned out, generally, to be pig-slow.

Contrast that to Itanic, a modern VLIW risc architecture that's pig-slow.

John

The 68332 is an old design - moving it to a smaller process means a great deal of re-work (compare it to moving your 68k assembly to a PPC cpu). The ColdFire cores are all done as high-level synthesisable cores which can be quickly implemented in different processes (such as if you'd coded in C) - in fact, there are far more ColdFire cores produced in ASICs than general purpose microcontrollers.

In a way, the MCF523x *is* the 68332 moved to a modern process.

The 150 MHz 5234 will give you 10 to 20 times the speed, which is a reasonable step up.

You got more than most. ;-) I was at the Grand Hyatt in NYC for the iAPX432 unveiling. What a monster! (both *unfinished* hotel and processor)

Ditto!. I've just spotted a couple of neat features in a Wavetek 190, function generator output amplifier and have already used ideas I've come across in HP kit. It's enormous fun to figure out someone else's hard work but subsequent use of one of these 'not-invented-here' techniques always give me a bit of guilt. S'pose I know deep down, it's stealing. Best thing is for equipment makers not to allow their circuitry out of the bulding. Won't stop determined copiers but'll stop people like me. john

I actually had a math coprocessor board for an HP 9816 lab computer that had a 432 on it, iirc. It came with a nice compiler for HP Basic. My instrument code just worked in those days--anyone else miss HP Basic for lab code?

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

Nope. I use PowerBasic. It lets you do anything you want...

inline assembly

modern stuff like CASE and WHILE

dim an array AT an address

FOR loops that do useful things at 30 MHz

nice graphics

compiles a 4000-line program in, say, 0.1 seconds

John

I have yet to "rip off" anything, but I do collect schematics of old stuff. And let it inspire me. sans guilt :)

Cheers Terry

I thought, "If it's that simple, why not do it in a big FPGA or CPLD?" So I did this:

Cheers! Rich

Yeah, and the support is also like free software: It may be great, it may be non-existant... and this is a significant risk if you're going to build a commercial product around it, since even with source code most mere mortals aren't going to be able to just dive into, say, some WiMax core and fix some obscure bug! (This reminds me of all those

saw

asfaik.

I designed the TANO Outpost 7 around the 6800, and I recall the cpu costing around $15 once things got rolling. The later generation unit, the Outpost 11, used a 6809 and occupied some tiny niche in computing history, except that they did that version after they fired me.

I did write (in Juneau, Alaska) a decent RTOS for the 6800, including a token-ring LAN, before anybody called it a token-ring LAN.

John

Not too sure about that; a few engineers looked at our original Codatron design and said that it was not reproduceable.. We placed it in public domain; no bites.