Pipelined 6502/z80 with cache and 16x clock multiplier

In article <4D2DC656.B2A7942F@bytecraft.com>, walter@bytecraft.com 
says...
> 
...

> I could still key in the boot code on a pdp11
> with my eye's closed.

Done a few of those, I used to do that daily ranging from paper tape to 
disk drives.

Mind you one disk drive boot method was load 5 into a register after 
reset. Wonder how many people could name the disk drive model....
 
> Regards,
> 
> 
> w..

-- 
Paul Carpenter          | paul@pcserviceselectronics.co.uk
<http://www.pcserviceselectronics.co.uk/>    PC Services
<http://www.pcserviceselectronics.co.uk/fonts/> Timing Diagram Font
<http://www.gnuh8.org.uk/>  GNU H8 - compiler & Renesas H8/H8S/H8 Tiny
<http://www.badweb.org.uk/> For those web sites you hate

In article <4D2DC656.B2A7942F@bytecraft.com>, walter@bytecraft.com 
says...
> 
> Frnak McKenney wrote:
> 
> > Ah, I miss Das Blinkenlights... <grin!>
> 
> I remember the strange feeling with the first home
> brew computer I built that did not have a blinking light
> and switches console. I was convinced that it would
> never be able to run or debug anything.

I remember the blinkenlight envy problem when I built
my first homebrew in the late 70's.  It was a Southwest
Technical Products  6800 system.  It actually had a monitor
that allowed you to communicate through a terminal instead
of depending on switches and lights.

For a terminal I had a TV Typewriter system.

One of my first printers was an IBM Selectric to which
I added a kit to convert serial data to solenoid pulls.
That was used to type an MS thesis in 1978.


Mark Borgerson






> 
> The feeling went away soon enough.
> 
> I could still key in the boot code on a pdp11
> with my eye's closed.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> 
> w..

On Jan 12, 7:17 pm, Paul <p...@pcserviceselectronics.co.uk> wrote:
> In article <almarsoft.5881524279275810...@aioe.org>, u...@fake.atmel.com
> says...
>
>
>
>
>
> > On Wed, 12 Jan 2011 09:08:49 +0200, upsided...@downunder.com wrote:
> > > On Wed, 12 Jan 2011 01:36:53 +0100, Ulf Samuelsson
> > > <u...@fake.atmel.com> wrote:
>
> > > >On Tue, 11 Jan 2011 21:21:48 +0100, Morten Reistad
> > <fi...@last.name>
> > > >wrote:
> > > >> Modern, well designed servers don't have many problems. You have
> > to
> > > >> do the occasional upgrade and reboot as part of meintenence, but
> > > >> the MTBF of single servers are around 5 years. More, if you
> > > >> go for redundancy everywhere and hot-swap parts.
>
> > > >> OS crashes in Linux, BSD etc from LTS releases that happen
> > > >> except for hardware issues are also very rare.
>
> > > >> -- mrr
>
> > > >IIRC, a VAX/VMS machine in Sweden has been running for > 20 years.
>
> > > That must have been the uptime for an entire VAX cluster. Individual
> > > machines could have been booted several times, but at least one
> > > machine has been running all the time.
>
> > > To upgrade the OS on the VAX cluster, take one machine off the
> > > cluster, upgrade that machine to the next version and then join the
> > > cluster. Repeat for the other machines.
>
> > > In the cluster the machines could have OS version separated by one
> > > step, thus several cycles of this rolling updates had to be made,
> > if a
> > > large number of versions is needed to upgrade at once.
>
> > No, it was a single machine controlling something related
> > to the railroad. Today, you would probably have used an
> > embedded system.
>
> I remember about 30 years two DEC engineers[1] went to Norway and the
> railroad ran on a dual PDP-11/70 system, where the code was wrong
> so did not run in failsafe, so needed both systems running. Field
> Service had to guess which part to change shut down the whole network
> to try a change then bring the whole lot back up.
>
> They went to fix so serial driven colour graphics systems, for mimic
> displays and had to cross marshalling yards, go up the stairs in a
> signalling tower, past the banks of Victorian relays still working
> after 100 years, but the embedded systems running the graphics were
> needing fixing after less than 3 months.

I can vouch for the longevity of railroad relays.  I worked for a
railroad one summer as a signalman's apprentice helper... talk about
the bottom of the ladder...  We maintained the signals and such.  I
remember the relays with glass bottoms so you could inspect the
contacts.  They had a slip of paper filled out with the date put in
service, the date last maintained and the names of the people who did
it.  These things weren't quite 100 years old, but some were as much
as 60 and had not been opened for the last 20 years!

Partly this is because of the low duty cycle.  They were only
activated a dozen or two each day which even after 20 years is only
five digits.  Every transistor in my PC does that many switches in a
fraction of a second.

It was a very different time though.  In those days, when you put your
name on something you wanted it to show how good you were.  Just like
the initials on the bottom of the gas tank on my old BMW motorcycle.
The tanks would run down the assembly line and ladies hand painted the
pin strips on the tank.  They put their initials on the bottom, a
different one on each side.  Do you know of any cars, trucks or
motorcycles that are initialed by the people who do the work anymore?

I like to think I have that work ethic.  But there are often realities
that don't let me do the quality of work I would prefer.  Deadlines
are always paramount!  Customers don't like failures, but they don't
like missed schedules either.

Rickcc

Mark Borgerson wrote:

> I remember the blinkenlight envy problem when I built
> my first homebrew in the late 70's.  It was a Southwest
> Technical Products  6800 system.  It actually had a monitor
> that allowed you to communicate through a terminal instead
> of depending on switches and lights.
>
> For a terminal I had a TV Typewriter system.
>
> One of my first printers was an IBM Selectric to which
> I added a kit to convert serial data to solenoid pulls.
> That was used to type an MS thesis in 1978.
>

One ham friend of mine wrote an ascii to morse code
driver in an eprom. He used it for error messages and
dumps to verify that his keyed in code was correct.

Those good old days weren't so good. I donated
my old computers to a computer museum a few
months ago. I was surprised that an old OSI I built
booted up after more than 25 years setting on a shelf.

Regards,


w..
--
Walter Banks
Byte Craft Limited
http://www.bytecraft.com

Walter Banks  <walter@bytecraft.com> wrote:
+---------------
| Mark Borgerson wrote:
| > I remember the blinkenlight envy problem when I built
| > my first homebrew in the late 70's.  ...
| > One of my first printers was an IBM Selectric to which
| > I added a kit to convert serial data to solenoid pulls.
| > That was used to type an MS thesis in 1978.
| 
| One ham friend of mine wrote an ascii to morse code
| driver in an eprom. He used it for error messages and
| dumps to verify that his keyed in code was correct.
+---------------

I once connected a small loudspeaker to the "Zero Balance"
console light of an IBM 1410 CPU, producing a click each time
an arithmetic operation had a zero result (or a comparison
tested "equal"). The resulting "music" gave a most illuminating
view into the progress of the currently-running program, e.g.,
a long "BZZZZZ..." whenever the operating system was waiting
for the printer to be put on-line, which was loud enough to
alert the operators lounging in the break room down the hall.
[The printer was left off-line when not in active use, since
that decreased the IBM maintenance charges!!]

Another useful case was a peculiar repetitive "squishing" sound
when running a large, multivariate nonlinear regression, that
got faster and faster as the regression approach convergence.
That sound allowed the statisticians waiting for their results
to make a rough guess as to how much longer the calculation
would continue.

[Of course, we had to disconnect it before each visit from
IBM Field Service, to avoid getting in trouble!]


-Rob

-----
Rob Warnock			<rpw3@rpw3.org>
627 26th Avenue			<URL:http://rpw3.org/>
San Mateo, CA 94403		(650)572-2607

In comp.arch Rob Warnock <rpw3@rpw3.org> wrote:
[...computers with loudspeakers...]

Like many other sites, we just used to keep a radio on the console table 
of the KI-10.

After about 1 hr of self-programming, you could tell what mood the thing
was in without having to scan the 100s and 100s of panels with 
100s and 100s of little globes for patterns.

The daily accounting job had its distinctive rumbles around 8am (if you
were one of those that lived across the road from the college and
walked in to see what the big blue boxes were up to before 9am
and the accouting was running late).
Something to do with a massive (10 MB!) external sort needed to get 
the accouting records into order in only 64kw of memory (25% of the 
available h/w).

If the daily job failed you could hear a bunch of squeaks and were
ready for the diagnostic that printed out a min later.

-- 
[A]s a Conservative, I have no tolerance for ambiguity.
  -- BONZO@27-32-240-172.static.tpgi.com.au [>70 nyms and counting], 14 Jan 2011 14:46 +1100

On 15/01/2011 11:26, in article
4d318459$0$27258$afc38c87@news.optusnet.com.au, "kym@kymhorsell.com"
<kym@kymhorsell.com> wrote:

> In comp.arch Rob Warnock <rpw3@rpw3.org> wrote:
> [...computers with loudspeakers...]
> 
> Like many other sites, we just used to keep a radio on the console table
> of the KI-10. ...

The ICT/L 1900s used an ASR-33 as the console, but it was modified to have a
small loudspeaker and volume control at the right end of the front face.

The speaker was connected to the V (overflow) bit & made the usual noises.

In the installation where I worked during University vacations, when the
operators started a long job, they would phone their rest room (N.B. NOT
"restroom" 8-), and leave the handset by the speaker. They would then retire
for a tea break and a bit of knitting (they were all women), picking up the
rest room phone from time to time to check whether the job had terminated.

-- 
Bill Findlay
with blueyonder.co.uk;
use  surname & forename;

On 15.1.11 12:59 , Rob Warnock wrote:
> Walter Banks<walter@bytecraft.com>  wrote:
>
> I once connected a small loudspeaker to the "Zero Balance"
> console light of an IBM 1410 CPU, producing a click each time
> an arithmetic operation had a zero result (or a comparison
> tested "equal"). The resulting "music" gave a most illuminating
> view into the progress of the currently-running program, e.g.,
> a long "BZZZZZ..." whenever the operating system was waiting
> for the printer to be put on-line, which was loud enough to
> alert the operators lounging in the break room down the hall.
> [The printer was left off-line when not in active use, since
> that decreased the IBM maintenance charges!!]
>
> Another useful case was a peculiar repetitive "squishing" sound
> when running a large, multivariate nonlinear regression, that
> got faster and faster as the regression approach convergence.
> That sound allowed the statisticians waiting for their results
> to make a rough guess as to how much longer the calculation
> would continue.
>

A similar thing was already built-in in the British Elliott 803
computer in the console, of early 1960's vintage. The speaker was
connected to the MS bit of the instruction register. As the basic
instruction cycle was 288 us, the sounds gave pretty good indication
of the progress of the processing.

-- 

Tauno Voipio

On Dec 19 2010, 7:25=A0pm, Brett Davis <gg...@yahoo.com> wrote:

> Is there a market for a 6502 era CPU that ran ~10x faster at
> ~10% more cost?
>
> I think I just described the AVR8 family of CPUs, so the answer
> would be yes...

But the AVR8 is a core, that gets included in an ASIC (Application-
Specific Integrated Circuit) fabricated on an FPGA (Field-Programmable
Gate Array).

Would there be a market for such a thing as a discrete chip? That's
more debatable. Certainly, since increasing the word size and
arithmetic capabilities is a more efficient optimization for general
computing than cache and pipelining, which are applied later, the
application would need to be one that didn't benefit from longer than
8-bit arithmetic.

John Savard

On Dec 24 2010, 1:06=A0pm, D Yuniskis <not.going.to...@seen.com> wrote:

> Then TI came along suffering some major hallucinations with their
> 99xx(x)'s... =A0:-/ =A0(clean idea but technology went a different
> way).

Well, they simply adopted a desperate strategy to make a 16-bit
processor with a general-register architecture possible with the
minimum number of transistors on the chip itself. As soon as more
transistors on the chip would become possible, _of course_ that would
no longer be needed.

John Savard