[HN Gopher] A RP2040 based DECstation 3000 emulator that can run...
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A RP2040 based DECstation 3000 emulator that can run DECWindows
Author : dmitrygr
Score : 181 points
Date : 2024-07-17 23:11 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Wow. Pretty neat stuff.
|
| This is another great way to understand what computers getting
| faster by three decimal orders of magnitude means :-)
| flyinghamster wrote:
| I know, really? It's hard to appreciate future shock until you
| bump into it. When cheap microcontrollers can emulate big-
| league workstations of the past, you _know_ you 're in the
| future. We long ago reached the point where you could emulate a
| PDP-11 faster than any real one ever built.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I run 3 IBM 4381's with Hercules (and two Altair Z80
| machines, with SimH) out of a Docker Swarm cluster of four
| RPi Zero W's mounted inside an Ikea picture frame.
| anyfoo wrote:
| I was thinking "this looks awfully familiar", and was going to
| link http://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=33.%20LinuxCard, but it
| turns out that the code is directly based on that!
|
| For anyone interested, it's still very worth visiting that link,
| as it describes the whole journey and technical details about how
| the original DECstation emulation code came to be.
| jdswain wrote:
| People used to get productive work done on DECstations, they were
| big and expensive in their time. Now we can recreate them for
| just a few dollars (plus the cost of a screen and keyboard).
| Today almost everything we do relies on the internet, so a wifi
| driver would be useful as well.
|
| Many things we do today require more processing power, but many
| things do not. Writing, terminals (well SSH could be a problem),
| email, hn. We used to do raytracing on a DECstation, had to use a
| remote X window to view the finished image in colour.
|
| You would think that a certain subset of people would quite like
| a simpler system today to work on, but I guess it's just easier
| to buy something modern with all the extra layers of complexity.
|
| Maybe this is because today programming largely relies on having
| access to the accumulated knowledge of the internet, and a very
| complex web browser.
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| My PhD was done in a DECstation 3100. The physics lab was a VAX
| environment (everyone had VTxxx terminals in their desk) but
| someone had bought a 3100, not figured out how to use it, and
| it was sitting in a corner - normally switched off. I managed
| to persuade them I could put it to use when I joined the group,
| and about 6 months later everyone else in the group had Unix
| workstations too... we named them all after asterix characters,
| mine was getafix.
| joshu wrote:
| most of my undergrad was done on decstation 3100s running ultrix.
| i loved the huge mono monitors. so many xterms open at once!
| amazing.
| lizknope wrote:
| When I started college in the fall of 1993 we had hundreds of
| DECstations. A mix of 2100 black and white machines, 3100, and a
| few 5000 machines. That's where I learned C/C++, ran Spice and
| various logic simulators. DEC had already announced the Alpha but
| the college decided to move to Sun and HP-UX which was probably a
| good decision because there was more software available for those
| platforms.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| The 3100s could be sluggish running local apps but really
| shined when used as an X terminal with apps on an alpha server.
| __d wrote:
| I had a 3100 on my desk for several years, with an LK201
| keyboard and a 19" color monitor, running Ultrix 4.2/3/4
| iirc.
|
| It was snappy enough running plain X11 or Athena (Xaw)
| applications, but Motif stuff slowed it down a bit. I had a
| tvtwm running a big virtual desktop, an Emacs with a bunch of
| frames, and a stack of Xterms.
|
| We had a couple of 5000/25's with the multimedia peripherals,
| but they weren't really worth it. IIRC, our group's server
| was a 5000/240 (?)
|
| Then we moved to Alphas (3000 AXP, then 4/255), then a Sun
| Ultra 10, and finally Linux PCs.
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| It was great to be able to walk up to any DECstation on campus,
| log in, and immediately get your desktop setup exactly the way
| you like it, without having to carry anything around with you
| all day. Displaying apps from remote Sun or the sweet new Alpha
| machines, too. Good times.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > walk up to any DECstation on campus, log in, and
| immediately get your desktop setup exactly the way you like
| it, without having to carry anything around with you all day.
|
| Just X over the network, or something fancier?
| perbu wrote:
| Just NFS, I assume. It doesn't take more.
| tankenmate wrote:
| and NIS/NIS+ if using NFS.
|
| being DecStations though it might have been using the
| whole DCE/RPC ecosystem (which was later adopted by MS
| for MSRPC and hence NTLM and SMB/CIFS).
| lizknope wrote:
| We had the whole DCE Project Athena setup at my school.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Athena
|
| Everything was encrypted through Kerberos and AFS. We had
| a mix of workstations running DEC Ultrix, SunOS, Solaris,
| HP-UX, SGI IRIX, IBM AIX, and Linux.
|
| The computing center compiled every GNU utility and put
| those in the PATH first so the environment was basically
| the same and you rarely had to worry about what type of
| machine you were on. We could ask a student who worked in
| the computing center to compile some new X11 window
| manager and they would and install it for all the
| different architectures and using AFS @sys string it
| would transparently link to the specific binary for that
| platform so you didn't need to modify your PATH
|
| We had Zephyr instant messaging and the .anyone file
| where you could put all your friends in a file and see
| who was logged in. We would send Zephyr messages on some
| broadcast groups and see who wanted to meet up for lunch.
| I made friends with people I didn't even know before
| through that.
|
| This was all from 1993-97 and then I got a job and it was
| like the stone age with NFS / NIS groups and chmod
| permissions. We are now creating stuff like zephyr with
| Slack
| guenthert wrote:
| Well any network filesystem really. AFS was popular at
| some larger sites.
| lizknope wrote:
| My school used AFS. It was great being able to use ACLs
| to give a specific student and no one else access to a
| directory in my account. Then we could make groups of
| students for group projects. Then I got a job in 1997 and
| it was back to traditional Unix groups where you need
| root or NIS admin access to create and modify groups.
| It's 2024 and I work at a company with 8,000 people and
| it still takes a few days to get multiple Unix group
| access for everything on a new project.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I've thought about trying out AFS; there are apparently
| open source server and clients available, and it seems to
| have some different design choices to let it work nicely
| over WAN compared to NFS. Less clear that the FOSS
| versions do the user/permission management stuff (though
| maybe they do), but that wouldn't matter as much for
| personal use.
| _joel wrote:
| Err, LDAP? SSSD etc :) or just beurocracy (I guess!)
| lizknope wrote:
| I'm not actually sure. We have a web page where we
| request group access and then I think it emails another
| project lead and they have to approve it but I don't know
| how it all works.
|
| Then we have another internal command that we run in
| every new shell where we include the groups we want
| access to. It runs and if we run the "groups" command
| before and after we see the new groups. But there is a
| limit to the number of groups so it is a pain if you need
| to access multiple projects at the same time because
| libraries and stuff are in different project areas.
| rcarmo wrote:
| I had a similar experience in college. Centralized home
| directories and X11 went a _long_ way. I loved it (still
| do, and prefer Remote Desktop to local compute most times).
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| Related, but is there a way to emulate a VT520 on a Pi using
| opensource? Just want to have a replica that looks like the
| ultimate form of that extinct lineage.
| poizan42 wrote:
| I think MAME can emulate it (as in running the actual ROM
| dumped from a DEC VT520), see
| https://wiki.mamedev.org/index.php/MIS
| stragies wrote:
| Doesn't fit the OP constraint "using opensource", but thanks,
| and +1 from me for pointing me to this :)
|
| The VT320 (+ VT330) seem to also be supported, are also on
| that list, but not the VT340 mentioned in sibling post.
| p_l wrote:
| As ex-owner of VT510, I'd say it's not really the ultimate form
| other than VT5xx being the last series from Digital.
|
| For ultimate expression of Digital's VT series I'd rather go
| for VT340+, which supported both SIXEL and ReGIS graphics in
| colour. VT525 has colour graphics, but I can't find any mention
| of either SIXEL or ReGIS support on it.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Yeah, 340 was an all-round better option.
| rbanffy wrote:
| IIRC, the VT-525 could do color text, but not graphics.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| According to this it does support SIXEL
| https://www.manualslib.com/manual/1200903/Digital-
| Equipment-...
| p_l wrote:
| That's "custom character support", or properly DRCS -
| Dynamically Redefinable Character Sets, not full SIXEL
| graphics.
|
| It's essentially a way to send custom "font" to terminal.
| You could push it to get certain level of graphics, but
| it's not the same as capability of sixel bitmap.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| There's something beautiful (and slightly jarring) about a
| computer where the ethernet and VGA ports are each bigger than
| the entire CPU and RAM. For all that it may have slowed more
| recently, Moore's law really did hit it out of the park in the
| long run:)
| michrassena wrote:
| I'm looking over at my Decstation 5000/260 with the burnt-out
| power supply. Maybe this is what I need to get that feeling back.
| boznz wrote:
| Wow! Really pushes the capability of the RP2040 to add a Memory
| Management Unit for the external RAM and incorporate DMA and a
| VGA display. The PIO on this chip is amazingly flexible.
| cellularmitosis wrote:
| Seriously!
|
| " The PSRAM/HyperRAM PIO engine provides 42/32 MB/s
| (write/read) of memory bandwidth. Further, four PIO engines are
| used to provide four seperate read/write memory ports. This
| allows independent memory access for the emulated CPU, video
| DMA, and receive/send Ethernet traffic."
| p_l wrote:
| Even more interesting, the PIO-based memory controller is
| faster than the one in DECstation 3100!
| bitwize wrote:
| I just looked up what PIO was in the context of the RP2040
| and... wow.
|
| They're like general-purpose Amiga Coppers. You can program
| them to control I/O lines and they will just do the I/O,
| independent of the CPU.
|
| This emulator is probably just the beginning of _really_ cool
| things that will be built with the Raspberry Pi Pico.
| ggm wrote:
| Interests me how little mention of Ultrix lies on the page.
| Pretty directly a BSD type, with some interesting twists, and the
| inclusion of DECnet support. the desktop was CDE?
|
| OSF/1 was such a departure. Nice, but different. Strange days.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| More mentions of Ultrix exist at the page where the emulator
| source code came from.
| petesoper wrote:
| What boggles my mind is the notion of running an RP2040 at
| 300mhz.
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| They over-clock really well. The guy who got DVI running on the
| RP2040 [1] had it clocking at 372MHz when doing 720p30.
|
| [1] https://github.com/Wren6991/PicoDVI
| nickdothutton wrote:
| My university was a DEC shop, 6000 and 8000 series in the machine
| room and DECstations and VAXstations in the lab, and a million
| vt320s for the masses in the terminal rooms. All +his project is
| missing as a candle that generates the smell of hot dust on CRT
| guns.
| wang_li wrote:
| I want to know if they have a patched version of Ultrix or a
| license file that allows more than two users? Ultrix on a
| MicroVAX was my first contact with a Unix system. Then briefly
| some SunOS 4.x and then extensively Ultrix on DECstation 3000.
| But while you can do some fiddly show and tell stuff without a
| license, only being able to have two process owners, one of which
| is root, is kind of limiting.
| nyrikki wrote:
| I ran over 1200 domains and the POP server for the largest ISP in
| a medium city on a single 3100, not on NT obviously, osf/1
| bodyfour wrote:
| Surely you mean Ultrix, not OSF/1? Unless you're misremembering
| the hardware model...
| chaoskitty wrote:
| I would love to get one os these and run NetBSD it. NetBSD runs
| better than one might think on a system with 32 megabytes of
| memory and a relatively slow CPU.
| mritun wrote:
| RP2040 is a micro-controller and does not have an MMU. It
| cannot _natively_ run any OS that relies on a MMU and that
| includes NetBSD. One can of course write an emulator that does
| and run that emulator on RP2040 and NetBSD on the emulator.
|
| edit: Emulators, of course!
| anyfoo wrote:
| This project _is_ an emulator that is able to run NetBSD (and
| Ultrix, and Linux, and potentially others)!
| Suppafly wrote:
| Other than pure nostalgia is there anything interesting you can
| run on this? Definitely a cool way to push the limits of a rp2040
| regardless.
| bitwize wrote:
| Once the Alpha ones get emulated you could run the original
| Alpha version of Open Genera (Symbolics Lisp machine OS).
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