rej@cornell.UUCP (08/09/84)
From: rej (Ralph Johnson) The following announcement was taken from the August 6'th edition of Electronics Week, and was probably taken from a Tektronix advertising blurb. Is this the "Magnolia" that I have heard mentioned? A $14,950 computer that runs the Smalltalk-80 programming language marks Tektronix' entrance into the artificial intelligence market. To hit the market early next year, the 4404 Artificial Intelligence System is designed to increase productivity in many areas of AI research and development, including expert systems, natural languages intelligent robotics, vision systems, automatic programming, and theorem proving. The standard 4404 is a desktop system built around a 10-Mz 68010 processor with no wait states. A hardware accelertor supports floating-point opertions. The 1 megabyte of random-access memory provided can be doubled. Page-on-demand memory management provides a large, 8-megabyte virtual memory address space tht permits users to develop complex programs without segmentation or overlays. The mass storage system consists of a 20-megabyte Winchester disk drive, a 5 1/4 floppy disk drive, and an optional streaming tape drive. The 4404's monochorme bit-mapped graphics display is refreshed at a 60-Hz rte, noninterlaced. The 640-by-480-pixel display acts a window into the 1,024-by-1,024-pixel display address space. A mouse comes with the system. Optional programming languages - Lisp and Prolog - and networking capabilities will be available next spring. This sounds like it might be a good Smalltalk engine, but I am surprised at the emphasis placed on AI. Do the people at Xerox use Smalltalk to do AI? Do they have a bunch of AI specific tools, or has Tektronix developed them, or is this just usual advertising hype? If the 4404 is really a good AI machine, then one answer to the question of what Smalltalk is good for is obvious. Ralph Johnson
wm@tekchips.UUCP (Wm Leler) (08/10/84)
No, the 4404 is not a Magnolia, it's called a Pegasus, and it runs Smalltalk even faster than a Magnolia. I could get one of the Pegasus people to answer your question as to why it is being marketed as an AI machine, but they're all off at the AAAI conference in Austin having a wonderful time (get it?). Wm Leler tektronix!tekchips!wm
steveg@hammer.UUCP (Steve Glaser) (08/11/84)
No, the 4404 is not a Magnolia. The internal code name for the 4404 was/is Pegasus. Much of the 4404/Pegasus product was based on work done in the Magnolia environment, but they are not the same machine. Magnolia is an in-house research machine only. It was designed for flexibility and was able to ignore lots of minor issues like UL listing, the new FCC EMI rules, manufacturability, cost effectiveness, etc. Real products, can't afford to ignore these issues. No, I'm not part of the Pegasus team, but I was involved in some of the early Magnolia work. Steve Glaser, tektronix!steveg
darrelj@sdcrdcf.UUCP (Darrel VanBuer) (08/17/84)
The Tektronics announcement is actually for Pegasus, a successor to the
internal Magnolia machine. Reportly, the only faster Smalltalk machine is
the ($120k) Xerox Dorado, and has the advantage of a large pointer size.
Smalltalk and Lisp have a number of common features making them both
suitable for AI work. High among these features are flexible data
structuring tools, an automatic garbage collector, and powerful interactive
debugging tools. Also, both have been thoroughly integrated into a
multiwindowing, graphic environment (not all lisps of course).
The most outstanding feature of the Pagasus is it's price. The next lowest
price for a comparable environment is a $26,000 for a Xerox Dandelion
(with Interlisp-D and a real 1024x808 screen). Machines like Suns aren't
really in this league (yet) because most of the windowing features are just
grafted onto the edges of unix (there isn't a moused-based editor, for
example).
--
Darrel J. Van Buer, PhD
System Development Corp.
2500 Colorado Ave
Santa Monica, CA 90406
(213)820-4111 x5449
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VANBUER@USC-ECL.ARPA