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Aucbvax.3169 fa.unix-wizards utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!unix-wizards Tue Sep 15 20:30:28 1981 Re: Perkin Elmer running Unix >From day@RAND-UNIX Tue Sep 15 20:24:06 1981 (Armando, please forgive me.)

Most of us only have experience with DEC equipment, and since Berkeley is doing such a fantastic job with VAX VMUNIX, who in his right mind would ever screw with anything other than a VAX?

Well, if a company is already a heavy Perkin Elmer real-time user, then maybe they would like to run UNIX on a Perkin Elmer to help them develop real time software. And just maybe one day The Wollongong Group's UNIX will be closer to being up to speed with all the Berkeley enhancements, and then the Perkin Elmer machine will definitely be an alternative that UNIX users in general might want to consider. I mean, who cares what the assembly language looks like?

Actually, the Perkin Elmers have a pretty impressive system architecture. They are 32-bit machines with currently a 24-bit address space. Raw CPU price/performance of their two machines is roughly equivalent to the two VAXes. The floating point is very fast and they claim more accurate than anybody, and the only real instruction set botch is the lack of signed characters, which is not really so bad. The memory management hardware is capable of paging in increments of 64KB, but the currently-running UNIX uses the vanilla V7 wholesale swapping. Not that bad if you aren't running any humongous processes.

The system is designed so you can plug in several off-the-shelf CPUs on the same system (LLL has a non-UNIX real- time system with 9), and things can be hooked up redundantly for practically non-stop performance. UNIX doesn't yet take any advantage of these possibilities, but they are there.

Their I/O throuput puts VAXes to shame: they can handle high-speed DMA serial input on lots of lines at once, and can run several 6250 tape drives simultaneously with no impact on the CPU.

UNIX is, after-all, a portable system, and I think it is clearly true that DEC will have to get even more serious about UNIX if they want to stay on top in the UNIX world. After all, Perkin Elmer was recently the first minicomputer manufacturer to have the sense to realize that UNIX is a far better software development environment than their own system, and to offer to sell it to their customers.

--dave

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