ads@canon.co.uk (Adam Billyard) (06/20/91)
Does anybody out there have, or know where to find, hardware information about this machine. I understand it was a bit of a disaster in the market place and was essentially withdrawn. I got it for 50 quid so I'm not complaining. It has a NS32081 floating point chip in it, but I have no information as to how its mapped into memory. The OS access to the FP hardware is through a trap and about .5k of code before getting to the actual hardware, giving the blistering performance of 3500 flops! The sad thing is that the NS32081 actually gives quite respectable performance (for its time). Also, how do you go about installing your own trap handlers on UN*X machines. I mean 'real' trap handlers not just using signal(). Do I just write to /dev/kmem in the exception tables? Any information you've got would be welcome. Cheers, Adam.