[HN Gopher] The TI (Lisp) Explorer Project
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The TI (Lisp) Explorer Project
Author : mepian
Score : 15 points
Date : 2023-06-08 21:39 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (shanen.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (shanen.medium.com)
| hackydev wrote:
| A related item https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23295041. The
| article mentions Patrick Dussud as the Lisp guru who moved to
| Mcirosoft. He then wrote the .NET runtime garbage collection in
| Lisp and translated it to C/C++ in the .NET code. Obviously it
| has been tremendously extended over the decades but you can still
| see the original quirkiness in the source files (now open
| sourced).
| johndoe0815 wrote:
| Very interesting insight into the Explorer development, thanks
| for posting the link!
|
| Some (possibly) interesting comments:
|
| - "later I think TI made (or tried to make) a plug-in card
| version of the TI Explorer for Macs" - this was the MicroExplorer
| NuBus card for Mac II-series machines, which was somewhat
| popular. Symbolics also built a NuBus Lisp machine board for
| Macs.
|
| - "This machine had one of the largest CPUs ever made until that
| time, something like half a million transistors." The original
| version of the Explorer (Explorer I) implemented the CPU in TTL
| logic (plus microcode ROMs and PROMs to implement some logic
| functions) on two large NuBus boards, the integrated version was
| later used in the Explorer II and MicroExplorer.
|
| - "the entire computer division was sold off to HP soon after I
| left" - one of the sad stories, HP destroyed a number of
| companies after they took over. In addition to TI's computer
| department (the TI990 16 bit machines were sold to some other
| company), Apollo, Tandem and DEC (via Compaq) suffered a similar
| fate.
|
| - "Pretty sure the sale included a sweet little Unix box". This
| was the TI1500, a 680x0-based asymmetric multiprocessor machine
| running TI System V (SVR3) with some pretty advanced concepts for
| its time (such as software RAID/striping), which was also based
| on NuBus. You could add a TI 68020 CPU board to an Explorer and
| run Unix on the side. I used to service and admin TI1500 machines
| as a student and am possibly the last person on Earth with the
| source code for TI's version of gcc (a horribly hacked version of
| gcc-1.37 in which the TI-specific code was #ifdef'd into the
| hp300 backend...). Back in the 90s, I had to request the code
| from TI in the US (after the division was sold to HP) and
| received a QIC tape with the gcc/binutils code some weeks later.
|
| The whole NuBus system was based on the NuMachine concept
| developed at MIT and later Western Digital
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NuMachine). TI bought the rights
| to NuBus in 1983, Apple and NeXT later adopted the system for
| their 68k machines. It would be interesting to know why they
| didn't go with Motorola's own VME bus.
|
| Fun trivia: Swissair used to run their whole booking system on TI
| Explorers and for some years in the 90s tried to buy every used
| Explorer system that was available to keep their systems running
| after the hardware was discontinued
| (http://lemonodor.com/archives/2002/10/ti_explorer_fam.html).
| neilv wrote:
| Looks like a NuMachine board with serial number "0004" (pre-
| production?) sold on eBay the other day:
| https://www.ebay.com/itm/266267742263
| johndoe0815 wrote:
| Nice - lots of AMD 29xx microcode stuff on there, I never saw
| any of the original NuMachine before.
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