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IP: more on also WORTH READING History of 8008?
From: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Sat, 11 May 2002 18:16:10 -0400
------ Forwarded Message From: gep2 () terabites com Date: Sat, 11 May 2002 18:11:07 -0500 To: dave () farber net, rmm () unidot com Cc: jeschmidt () jeschmidt com, 74407.114 () compuserve com, han () bridgeheadnetworks com, jcole () airmail net, methods () best com, lew () donzis com, gordonbr () Microsoft com, gep2 () terabites com Subject: IP: also WORTH READING History of 8008? Delighted to hear from Robert McClure with his additional details! Quite fascinating.
...Phil, who took over the company
when Charley had a dispute with one of the investors, also wanted a first class industrial design and when to Raymond Loewy associates in New York. The associate actually assigned to the project was a young industrial designer named John Frassanito. Jack designed the 3300 and substantially every piece of equipment that CTC (later Datapoint) ever manufactured. (He has also done, and still does, a lot of design work for NASA as well.) I will comment here that the original 2200 design STILL looks modern today, thirty years later. A beautiful piece of design by Jack! (I don't recall him ever going by "John", though, we always used "Jack").
...A slight error crept into the story at this point.
While Harry was a major part of the software effort, much of the early software, including the operating system, was designed and written by Mike Green, another former student of mine who I had introduced to Datapoint. (For the historical record, Mike subsequently went to medical school, and currently practices in Minneapolis.) Mike certainly was involved at the early stages, although the 1971-dated assembly listing I have for CTOS carries Harry's initials (H.S.P.) and not Mike's. One of Mike's major contributions certainly was writing the original ASCII-decimal "String Math" or "Stath" business math routine package which was used by all the earliest versions of Databus, and helped to make the system a business machine and not just a hobbyist microcomputer. When I took over development work on the DOS, I took it over from Harry and not from Mike (who didn't actually move to San Antonio to work 'onsite' at Datapoint until later), and most of the internal "fingerprints" in the OS code showed every visible sign of being Harry's. I don't know for a fact how much input Mike had into the OS design (either CTOS or DOS) but to the best of my knowledge and belief it was much less than Harry's. When I later was working on the ARC System software (for the first commercial LAN system) I had already decided on the mapping technique which would map [entire] remote disk volumes (on file servers) into specific local "drive" slots. But I wasn't sure what the best way would be to user-conceptualize the command which would manipulate that internal table. Mike Green was sitting in the beanbag in my living room when he commented that "You know, Gordon, it seems to me like the volume mounting operation is the key to the whole thing" and thus the MOUNT command concept for LANs was born (quite analogous to the OS/360 MOUNT command used for tapes and other drives in fact). The user would specify the logical volume name, their user name and password for accessing that volume, as well as what local "drive" number they wanted to mount the remote volume into. (It was not necessary to specify what server the volume resided on, the system would locate it by itself... a refinement which most competing LAN software curiously STILL lacks today!). So Mike contributed in a significant way to my approach of mapping entire remote server-hosted volumes into "local drive slots", (Microsoft calls this "Map Network Volume") which was key to allowing programs to manipulate remotely hosted data scattered across multiple different servers and sites without having to be written specifically for LAN environments. Mike Green was also one of the two principal architects (with John Cole) of the later Datapoint 1500 DOS (which departed from Datapoint convention in that it used the similar-but-not-identical Zilog Z-80 microprocessor, and thus started from a totally separate source code base).
Discussions between Phil and myself led to the program to get the
2200 CPU reduced to silicon by Texas Instruments and Intel. I remember hearing talk that it took a lot of work to find a company that would attempt doing that... do you recall if any (which?) other companies were approached, before TI and Intel made their respective runs at it?
I felt
sure that that would ultimately be the way to go, but didn't realize the long struggle that it would take to get their. As was noted, TI did not successfully build a processor (but did apply for and receive several patents on the monolithic implementation of several of the features in the 2200 CPU). I heard that they did tentatively produce prototype silicon, but that it only just barely worked ("millivolts between signal and noise levels" from what I heard).
It is with regret that I note that several of the major participants in this
drama are no longer with us, most notably Phil Ray, Gus Roche, and Dick Norman. Indeed. And before more of the people around at the time disappear, it's important that some of this history be recorded so that commonly held misimpressions (like that Intel designed the first eight-bit general-purpose microcomputer, or that Robert Metcalfe was the father of local area networking (!!! his clumsy two-megabit, thick-wire Ethernet was hopelessly impractical, and never would have been widely commercially successful) can avoid becoming accepted (incorrectly) as 'fact'. Thanks for your contributions, Bob!!! Both to the original development, AND to your additions to this most interesting history. Gordon Peterson http://personal.terabites.com/ Support the Anti-SPAM Amendment! Join at http://www.cauce.org/ 12/19/98: Partisan Republicans scornfully ignore the voters they "represent". 12/09/00: the date the Republican Party took down democracy in America. ------ End of Forwarded Message For archives see: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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