From: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!info-vax Newsgroups: fa.info-vax Title: 730 hacking [Is it a Vax? or..] Article-I.D.: ucbvax.56 Posted: Mon Mar 21 16:57:16 1983 Received: Thu Mar 24 23:34:40 1983 >From GEOFF5@SRI-CSL Mon Mar 21 16:55:50 1983 Received: by UCBVAX.ARPA (3.331/3.17) id AA01154; 21 Mar 83 16:56:59 PST (Mon) To: AWalker@RUTGERS Cc: INFO-VAX@MIT-MC In-Reply-To: Msg of 8 Mar 1983 1658-EST from HobbitRemailed-Date: 20 Mar 1983 2309-PST Remailed-From: the tty of Geoffrey S. Goodfellow Remailed-To: Info-VAX@SRI-CSL.ARPA: ; I would be very much suprised if the 730 was an economical or reasonable PDP-11. That isn't what they want to sell it as. The 730 doesn't have much hardware that would speed anything up. According to people inside DEC we lisp hackers here talk to, the significant investment in the 730 is the microcode developement tools. The microengine itself is standard bitslice technology frob that anybody out of 6.032 (MIT course number) could build. The thing loads its microcode everytime it boots. It doesn't take any leap of faith to figure that what DEC is in a position of doing is selling extra MicroCode to people with particular applications. Some companies already hack loadable microcode into the PDP-11 series for special purposes: signal processing, character recognition, typesetting, areas in which there are big bucks; where one has the possibility of being competitive with more slickly produced general purpose hardware. (e.g. from IBM) However, the PDP-11 is pretty much dead-end for these applications, for obvious reasons. The 730, and faster such microengines, would not be. Here is the question of the day: Q: What BUSS do you think the 730 processor fits into? Anyway, be careful with munging system generation parameters, keep careful records to fall back on when you wedge the machine. I doubt this will help PDP-11 emulation mode though. Do everything you can to decrease disk I/O activity, buy more memory and increase buffer sizes. Have people switch to EDT, or Emacs. An editor which keeps the text in-the-address-space will improve the disk I/O situation, which is critical on a 730. -gjc