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PERQ
PERQ
Sep. 7th, 2024 01:12 am
graydon2: (Default)
[personal profile] graydon2
A note on the PERQ computer.
Through a sequence of random events (seeing a note about an Alto
emulator, listening to a truly atrocious podcast-retelling of the
NeXT computer company) I found myself reading about the PERQ computer
this evening.
Reader: the modern Mac is not "a copy of an Alto". I mean it kinda
is. But more recently than that, it's really a copy of a PERQ.
[perq][perq-guy]
The PERQ is an early, commercial, and technical-user-focused version
of an Alto. Except not quite. It had the same fast CPU, large local
memory and bitmapped display with fast microcoded rasterops (a
so-called "3M machine" -- 1 MIPS CPU, 1 megabyte RAM, 1 megapixel
display, "and 1 megapenny of price", about $10,000). It had the same
GUI with overlapping windows. It also had Pascal, Fortran, C and
Lisp. It also demoed and started taking orders in 1979 and shipped in
1980, before the competition, including before Xerox. The Xerox Star
(Xerox did finally commercialize the Alto) and Apollo/Domain each
shipped a year later, in 1981.
The Sun-1? Another year out, 1982. The Apple Lisa? A third the screen
real estate and another year out, 1983. Mac? 1984 of course. After
the Mac (which was not especially successful), Steve Jobs actually
wound up in Apple's SuperMicro division trying to make a 3M machine
for real, to crack that market -- a market mostly consisting of
PERQs, Suns and Apollos at the time. Apple's foray was going to be
the Big Mac. It never shipped. When he left Apple, that team went
with him to NeXT, where .. they tried again to build a 3M machine.
And they did! Just extremely late, in 1989. And still $10k, despite
almost a decade of brutal price competition on the low end.
The PERQ was literally built to be a commercial Alto, a
version-you-could-buy. But it was also not from Palo Alto, or
Mountain View, or Cupertino, or anywhere in California. It was from
the much less flashy but extremely important computer town of
Pittsburgh, PA. It was built by a CMU spinoff: the Three Rivers
Computer Company (Pittsburgh is at the confluence of 3 rivers). One
of the company's founders -- Brian Rosen -- actually went to work on
the Star at Xerox PARC for two years, from 76 to 78, and then came
back to Three Rivers to pitch everything-he-learned as the basis for
a new machine, which became the PERQ. (It was briefly even called the
"Pascalto", because like all machines in this genre it supported
user-written microcode and custom instruction sets, and the PERQ ran
Pascal P-code. Through a microcode emulator. Things were wild.)
Ok so maybe the PERQ is just Alto in commercial clothing? No there's
more! The PERQ didn't run Xerox Pilot or whatever, it ran either PNX
(a straight Unix port done by ICL running on yet another microcoded
VM, C-code) or this other operating system called Accent. What's
that? Why, it's the predecessor of Mach! Written by CMU Professor
Rick Rashid and his grad student Avie Tevanian. Does that name sound
familiar? Avie and Mach are what NeXT bet their farm on in 1988. Mach
is what Apple bet their farm on when they bought NeXT, and is what
all of today's Apple stuff from watches to phones to laptops runs on.
And when Steve pitched Avie to join NeXT in 1986 it was because of
the Usenix paper Avie just published about Mach, which ran on VAX,
IBM RT/PC (the RS/6000 predecessor) and ... PERQ. Because Avie and
Rick, like everyone at CMU, were big PERQ fans, had PERQs all over
their department as surrogate Altos. PERQs were the Altos you could
buy, that CMU had bought a bunch of, that ran Unix and Mach.
But wait, why did CMU even want surrogate Altos? How did CMU people
have any connection to Altos before PERQs, what motivated that
connection, and .. how did Xerox wind up connected here? Aha! Through
the even less well-thought-of neighboring city of Rochester, NY!
Xerox isn't a west coast company at all. It's from Rochester. Because
of even older origin-stories involving the optics business, and
Kodak, and (long digression here into east-coast tech history).
Anyway it's from Rochester. But their chief scientist Jack Goldman
was former faculty from CMU which is a short drive from Rochester,
and he set up a wild unsupervised west-coast lab in Palo Alto, called
Xerox PARC, and when PARC made the Alto, Xerox HQ back in Rochester
naturally donated a bunch of them to University of Rochester, and
Rick Rashid (then a Rochester PhD) and Avie Tevanian (then a
Rochester undergrad) spent their days at Rochester hacking video
games on the Alto. And dreaming of someday having their own.
And then they went down the road to CMU: Rick to a professorship, and
Avie to be his student. And CMU was Jack Goldman's alma mater, and so
Xerox had also donated a bunch of Altos there. And CMU was enjoying
their donated Altos so much they had started up a 3M machine joint
hardware-software project: SPICE. Which had ARPA money and was going
to involve buying 200 machines from their former colleagues down the
street at Three Rivers Computer Company -- 200 PERQs. Which was the
first of the 3M machines everyone actually bought and used, in the
years between the 3M machine becoming a cool idea and the market
imploding right as NeXT tried to enter it.
So anyway, short story long: the path to modern macOS and iOS
machines is less than 100% sunny California people; it involves quite
a bit of slushy rust belt grad students (fun fact: mach is named
after Pittsburgh winter slush, a mishearing of the word "muck".)
(There's also much more here involving a whole joint development
situation with ICL, not just a Unix port, which you definitely should
fall down the rabbit hole of -- especially if you're not familiar
with ICL itself! -- but I think I've talked enough here already.)
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