Old Vintage Computing Research

I like the Power ISA very much, but there's nothing architecturally obvious to say that the next natural step from the Motorola 68000 family must be to PowerPC. For example, the Palm OS moved from the DragonBall to ARM, and it's not necessarily a well-known fact that the successor to Commodore's 68K Amigas was intended to be based on PA-RISC, Hewlett-Packard's "Precision Architecture" processor family. (That was the Hombre chipset, and prototype chips existed prior to Commodore's demise in 1994, though controversy swirled regarding backwards compatibility.) Sure, Apple and Motorola were two-thirds of the AIM alliance, and there were several PowerPC PowerBooks available when the fall of 1997 rolled around. But what if the next PowerBooks had been based on PA-RISC instead?

Well, no need to strain yourself imagining it. Here's nearly as close as you're gonna get.

In October 1997 you could have bought a PowerBook 3400c running up to a 240MHz PowerPC 603e for $6500 [about $13,000 in 2025 dollars], which was briefly billed as the world's fastest laptop, or you could have bought this monster new to the market, the RDI PrecisionBook running up to a 160MHz (later 180MHz) PA-7300LC starting at $12,000 [$24,000]. Both provided onboard Ethernet, SCSI and CardBus PCMCIA slots. On the other hand, while the 3400c had an internal media bay for either a floppy or CD-ROM, both external options on the PrecisionBook, the PrecisionBook gave you a 1024x768 LCD (versus 800x600 on the 3400c), a bigger keyboard, at least two 2.5" hard disk bays and up to 512MB of RAM (versus 144MB) -- and HP-UX.

And, through the magic of Apple's official Macintosh Application Environment, you could do anything on it an HP PA-RISC workstation could do and run 68K Mac software on it at the same time. Look at the photograph and see: on our 160MHz unit we've got HP-UX 11.00 CDE running simultaneously with a full Macintosh System 7.5.3 desktop. Yes, only a real Power Mac could run PowerPC software back then, but 68K software was still plentiful and functional. Might this have been a viable option to have your expensive cake and eat it too? We'll find out and run some real apps on it (including that game we must all try running), analyze its performance and technical underpinnings, and uncover an unusual artifact of its history hidden in the executable.

(A shout-out to Paul Weissman, the author and maintainer of the incomparable PA-RISC resource OpenPA.net, who provided helpful insights for this article.)

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It's time for another entry in the Prior Art Department and today we'll consider a forgotten yet still extant sidebar of the early 1990s Internet. If you had Internet access at home back then, it was almost certainly dialup modem (like I did); only the filthy rich had T1 lines or ISDN. Moreover, from a user perspective, the hosts you connected to were their own universe. You got your shell account or certain interactive services over Telnet (and, for many people including yours truly, E-mail), you got your news postings from the spool either locally or NNTP, and you got your files over FTP. It may have originated elsewhere, but everything on the host you connected to was a local copy: the mail you received, the files you could access, the posts you could read. Exceptional circumstances like NFS notwithstanding, what you could see and access was local -- it didn't point somewhere else.

Around this time, however, was when sites started referencing other sites, much like the expulsion from Eden. In 1990 both HYTELNET and Archie appeared, which were early search engines for Telnet and FTP resources. Since they relied on accurate information about sites they didn't control, both of them had to regularly update their databases. Gopher, when it emerged in 1991, consciously tried to be a friendlier FTP by presenting files and resources hung from a hierarchy of menus, which could even point to menus on other hosts. That meant you didn't have to locally mirror a service to point people at it, but if the referenced menu was relocated or removed, the link to it was broken and the reference's one-way nature meant there was no automated way to trace back and fix it. And then there was that new World Wide Web thing introduced to the public in 1993: a powerful soup of media and hypertext with links that could point to nearly anything, but they were unidirectional as well, and the sheer number even in modest documents could quickly overwhelm users in a rapidly expanding environment. Not for nothing was the term "linkrot" first attested around 1996, as well as how disoriented a user might get following even perfectly valid links down a seemingly infinite rabbithole.

Of course, other technically-minded folks had long been aware of the problem, and as early as 1989 an academic team in Austria was already trying to attack the problem of "access to all kinds of information one can think of." In this world, documents and media resources could be associated together into a defined hierarchy, the relationships between them were discoverable and bidirectional, and systems were searchable by design. Links could be in anything, not just text. Clients could log into servers or be anonymous, logged-in users could post content, and in the background servers could talk to other servers to let them know what changes had occurred so they could synchronize references. Along the way, as new information resources via WAIS, Gopher and the Web started to appear, their content could also be brought into these servers to form a unified whole. This system was Hyper-G, and we'll demonstrate it -- on period-correct classic RISC hardware, as we do -- and provide the software so you can too.

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Even though I'm a Power ISA bigot through and through (typed on ppc64le!), to this day I still have an enduring sweet spot for Hewlett-Packard's PA-RISC "Precision Architecture" because it was my first job out of college. It doesn't hurt that it was one of the saner RISCs, with a fairly clean instruction set except for its odd deficiency with atomics, and was quite a piledriver in its day due to its cache arrangement and early adoption of SIMD. We ran HP-UX 10.20 on a big K250 where I developed database applications on Informix, later upgrading it to an L-class something or other (I think an L2000). When I was still consulting for the university one of my tasks was even setting up a Visualize C3750 workstation, which was a stupid fast machine at the time and I'm sure served very well for them doing protein visualization. Heck, if Commodore had stuck around longer, we might really have had a PA-RISC Amiga instead of the modern third-party PowerPC systems. (I've got some other wacky PA-RISC machines around here I might introduce you to later.)

The university only used the big stuff, though, not "low end" pizzaboxen like the versatile and (relatively) ubiquitous 9000/712 "Gecko," which besides being a popular 1990's RISC workstation of its own -- id Software had one during their NeXTSTEP days -- turned up as the system base in other surprising places. One of these was HP's own Agilent 16505A protocol analyser, and another was as the basis of the MIL-SPEC SAIC Galaxy portable workstations.

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