mss@dartvax.UUCP (Mark S. Sherman) (01/09/84)
Syte Information Technology came by last Thursday and talked to us about their NS16032 based system. Unfortunately, we didn't get to see a working piece of hardware. A summary of the information we got follows. Syte offers high performance work stations (though they do not use that word). The station consists of a box that can hold 8 boards, a screen (bit mapped display), mouse, and a keyboard. At the moment, you also have to get a hard disk, but that is planning on being optional. The only board you need is a CPU board. In the minimum configuration, the CPU board has 1 megabtye of memory and a single 16032 processor (10MHz clock) and MMU (to be upgraded to 32032 when chip supply is sufficient and reliable). The system can hold up to 4 XX032 processors. The 4 processors share an address space. In the absence of any other boards, 1/4 megabtye of CPU board is used for display memory for the bit map display. The CPU board also has 4 multibus slots, ethernet connection, Intel 80186 for high speed i/o, Intel 8051(?) for slow speed i/o, and an interface for a Centronix printer. Three other kinds of cards are available: Graphics, Memory and "Accelerator" which I interpret as floating point and numeric support. The graphics card hold the graphics memory, performs bit blt, and provides line graphics and raster ops for the bitmap display. The 1 megabyte of memory on the graphics display can support up to 4 bit-mapped displays (we were told that four users might share a single workstation, hence the need to share the graphics board as well). The GKS graphics standard is also supposed to be provided (I do not know what this is). The memory board is used, not surprisingly, to add more memory. Total amount of memory for a workstation is 15 megabytes, though I am not sure how much goes on a CPU card and how much on each memory card. Apparently this is subject to the currently available memory chips. The accelerator board runs at 1 MFLOP. They have Unix System V and Smalltalk-80. 4.2 BSD is coming soon. We were also told a series of other languages but I didn't catch if they are ready to go, to be available soon, or planned in the indefinite future: Pascal, Ada, C, Fortran. Misc. Info.: One can add more than one board of each kind into the 8 slots. The system is in Beta test. The 8-slot model draws 20 amps. A 4-slot version is planned that will take less power (and cost less). A diskless version is slated to cost about $16K. With a 5 1/4 inch Winchester, $25K. Design Philosophy: The system is supposed to be an "object oriented" architecture, with every device, process and file an object. It is not clear if activation records are objects or if a process must be allocated. No information on object identification. An article in Electronic Design, Dec. 22, '83, describes some their ideas, including GEM, Global Environment Manager. Apparently GEM handles all file, object and process manipulation. Objects are hierarchically ordered, like Simula, with local procedures called "methods", like Smalltalk. The article implies that a search for a method name in an object always occurs on every method invocation (procedure call). There is also an implication that one can (invisibly) call methods of objects anywhere on the network. Other implications in the article: you have to use the builtin file system, process handler and message passing protocols. Although some protection facilities were alluded to, it sounds more like Unix access control bits than Hydra or 432 capabilities. We were given some confidential materials to look at, but I decided to write this first to make sure that everything I said I got "openly". Given the nature of the company (one year old, in beta test), some details are bound to change. The person who talked with us was James VanBeek. The address of Syte is 11339 Sorrento Valley Road, San Diego, CA 92121, (619)457-2270. If anyone has info on Syte systems or other 16032 based systems, we at Dartmouth would like very much to here about them. Mark Sherman (Mark.Sherman@CMU-CS-A, decvax!dartvax!mss) Dept. of Math and Computer Science Dartmouth College Hanover, NH 03755 (603) 646-2415