Perkin Elmer running Unix

[utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!unix-wizards]

>From day at 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