There's something beautiful (and slightly jarring) about a computer where the ethernet and VGA ports are each bigger than the entire CPU and RAM. For all that it may have slowed more recently, Moore's law really did hit it out of the park in the long run:)
People used to get productive work done on DECstations, they were big and expensive in their time. Now we can recreate them for just a few dollars (plus the cost of a screen and keyboard). Today almost everything we do relies on the internet, so a wifi driver would be useful as well.
Many things we do today require more processing power, but many things do not. Writing, terminals (well SSH could be a problem), email, hn. We used to do raytracing on a DECstation, had to use a remote X window to view the finished image in colour.
You would think that a certain subset of people would quite like a simpler system today to work on, but I guess it's just easier to buy something modern with all the extra layers of complexity.
Maybe this is because today programming largely relies on having access to the accumulated knowledge of the internet, and a very complex web browser.
My PhD was done in a DECstation 3100. The physics lab was a VAX environment (everyone had VTxxx terminals in their desk) but someone had bought a 3100, not figured out how to use it, and it was sitting in a corner - normally switched off. I managed to persuade them I could put it to use when I joined the group, and about 6 months later everyone else in the group had Unix workstations too… we named them all after asterix characters, mine was getafix.
When I started college in the fall of 1993 we had hundreds of DECstations. A mix of 2100 black and white machines, 3100, and a few 5000 machines. That's where I learned C/C++, ran Spice and various logic simulators. DEC had already announced the Alpha but the college decided to move to Sun and HP-UX which was probably a good decision because there was more software available for those platforms.
It was great to be able to walk up to any DECstation on campus, log in, and immediately get your desktop setup exactly the way you like it, without having to carry anything around with you all day. Displaying apps from remote Sun or the sweet new Alpha machines, too. Good times.
> walk up to any DECstation on campus, log in, and immediately get your desktop setup exactly the way you like it, without having to carry anything around with you all day.
I had a 3100 on my desk for several years, with an LK201 keyboard and a 19" color monitor, running Ultrix 4.2/3/4 iirc.
It was snappy enough running plain X11 or Athena (Xaw) applications, but Motif stuff slowed it down a bit. I had a tvtwm running a big virtual desktop, an Emacs with a bunch of frames, and a stack of Xterms.
We had a couple of 5000/25's with the multimedia peripherals, but they weren't really worth it. IIRC, our group's server was a 5000/240 (?)
Then we moved to Alphas (3000 AXP, then 4/255), then a Sun Ultra 10, and finally Linux PCs.
For anyone interested, it's still very worth visiting that link, as it describes the whole journey and technical details about how the original DECstation emulation code came to be.
Wow! Really pushes the capability of the RP2040 to add a Memory Management Unit for the external RAM and incorporate DMA and a VGA display. The PIO on this chip is amazingly flexible.
“ The PSRAM/HyperRAM PIO engine provides 42/32 MB/s (write/read) of memory bandwidth. Further, four PIO engines are used to provide four seperate read/write memory ports. This allows independent memory access for the emulated CPU, video DMA, and receive/send Ethernet traffic.”
My university was a DEC shop, 6000 and 8000 series in the machine room and DECstations and VAXstations in the lab, and a million vt320s for the masses in the terminal rooms. All †his project is missing as a candle that generates the smell of hot dust on CRT guns.
I know, really? It's hard to appreciate future shock until you bump into it. When cheap microcontrollers can emulate big-league workstations of the past, you know you're in the future. We long ago reached the point where you could emulate a PDP-11 faster than any real one ever built.
I run 3 IBM 4381's with Hercules (and two Altair Z80 machines, with SimH) out of a Docker Swarm cluster of four RPi Zero W's mounted inside an Ikea picture frame.
Related, but is there a way to emulate a VT520 on a Pi using opensource? Just want to have a replica that looks like the ultimate form of that extinct lineage.
As ex-owner of VT510, I'd say it's not really the ultimate form other than VT5xx being the last series from Digital.
For ultimate expression of Digital's VT series I'd rather go for VT340+, which supported both SIXEL and ReGIS graphics in colour. VT525 has colour graphics, but I can't find any mention of either SIXEL or ReGIS support on it.
Readit News
Many things we do today require more processing power, but many things do not. Writing, terminals (well SSH could be a problem), email, hn. We used to do raytracing on a DECstation, had to use a remote X window to view the finished image in colour.
You would think that a certain subset of people would quite like a simpler system today to work on, but I guess it's just easier to buy something modern with all the extra layers of complexity.
Maybe this is because today programming largely relies on having access to the accumulated knowledge of the internet, and a very complex web browser.
Just X over the network, or something fancier?
It was snappy enough running plain X11 or Athena (Xaw) applications, but Motif stuff slowed it down a bit. I had a tvtwm running a big virtual desktop, an Emacs with a bunch of frames, and a stack of Xterms.
We had a couple of 5000/25's with the multimedia peripherals, but they weren't really worth it. IIRC, our group's server was a 5000/240 (?)
Then we moved to Alphas (3000 AXP, then 4/255), then a Sun Ultra 10, and finally Linux PCs.
For anyone interested, it's still very worth visiting that link, as it describes the whole journey and technical details about how the original DECstation emulation code came to be.
Since I have you here, what is the "DMA Sniffer" that you mention in your doc? A very quick search on the Internet didn't reveal too much.
“ The PSRAM/HyperRAM PIO engine provides 42/32 MB/s (write/read) of memory bandwidth. Further, four PIO engines are used to provide four seperate read/write memory ports. This allows independent memory access for the emulated CPU, video DMA, and receive/send Ethernet traffic.”
They're like general-purpose Amiga Coppers. You can program them to control I/O lines and they will just do the I/O, independent of the CPU.
This emulator is probably just the beginning of really cool things that will be built with the Raspberry Pi Pico.
This is another great way to understand what computers getting faster by three decimal orders of magnitude means :-)
For ultimate expression of Digital's VT series I'd rather go for VT340+, which supported both SIXEL and ReGIS graphics in colour. VT525 has colour graphics, but I can't find any mention of either SIXEL or ReGIS support on it.
The VT320 (+ VT330) seem to also be supported, are also on that list, but not the VT340 mentioned in sibling post.