[rescue] sun 3/60 update

[Dan Moisa]

Thanks for sharing Phil, those are stories I'd literally pay for - awesome
stuff!

On Tue, May 27, 2025, 10:42 Phil Stracchino via rescue <rescue at sunhelp.org>
wrote:

> On 5/27/25 13:16, Romain Dolbeau via rescue wrote:
> > Le mar. 27 mai 2025 à 05:35, Dan Moisa via rescue <rescue at sunhelp.org>
> a écrit :
> >
> > I'd never realized that the "Sun-style" MMU on those machines was done
> > in discrete logic and PALs... somehow from all the '030-era systems
> > with gate-array custom chips, I expected to see that and wondered
> > where you sourced them from... I understand now why they chose to do
> > the sun3x for the '030 and use the built-in MMU - cheaper and smaller
> > than having all of that on the board.
>
>
> This is now making me think of a project I worked on around 1988 or 1989
> in association with NASA Dryden Flight Research Center.  We designed and
> built a modular embedded microcomputer running on INMOS Transputers
> (hardware parallel processing), all hand-wirewrapped prototypes, modules
> not much larger than a deck of cards, that stacked and fit inside a set
> of similarly stacked hermetically-sealed aluminum modules with liquid
> freon pumped through them for cooling.  We used high-density ZIP memory,
> built our own RAS/CAS refresh circuitry using quartz delay lines because
> nothing else on the market then was fast enough.  If memory serves, we
> could display somewhere on the order of 1280x960 graphics in 24-bit
> color, and could redraw the entire screen inside the flyback time of the
> CRT.
>
> This ended up flying in the Hercules air-launched booster, in which the
> heatsink medium for the cooling was chicken fat inside the wing (chicken
> fat has a ridiculous specific heat capacity; Dryden bought the stuff in
> tank-car loads), as well as in, uh, other projects that I can't talk about.
>
> It was a fun project to work on.
>
>
> --
>    Phil Stracchino
>    Fenian House Publishing
>    phils at caerllewys.net
>    phil at co.ordinate.org
>    Landline: +1.603.293.8485
>    Mobile:   +1.603.998.6958
>
> _______________________________________________
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>
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