These machines bring back a lot of nostalgia for me. I first learned Unix on a HP 9000 550. I played around a bit with an HP 300 and envied the HP 3000 series. Later I went even further back in time and purchased an HP 1000E. It was a lot of fun getting it working but RTE-A was not a very exciting OS. These machines were already quite old when I got a hold of them back in the early 90s.
I first learned programming on an HP 3000 time-sharing system. Back in the 70's, Basic only. I was quite surprised to see that the line had not stagnated at that point, since that was both my first and last exposure to it.
How long until we can buy germanium or gallium arsenide chips with switching rates/clock speeds in the hundreds of gigahertz or low terahertz? My (probably wrong) understanding is that this is feasible now but researchers are still developing efficient and scalable manufacturing processes.
This isn't really feasible due to the limited propagation speed of em-waves (ie. electronic signals). I mean, sure, it's probably possible to get to, say, 50 or 100 GHz with very deep pipelines (ie. only limited propagation of signals in each cycle), but we've already seen 15 years ago that deep pipelines basically don't work for general purpose computing.
Additionally the frequency-dependent losses are unlikely to fundamentally change.
SoS is typically used in hardware that's exposed to ionizing radiation. I suppose it has other favorable characteristics (heat, performance, etc) but I'm no expert...
"Sapphire is an excellent insulator which wels reduce leakage currents, as well as spurious currents from such things as radiation. Radiation tolerance is perhaps what SoS became known for most, but its low power performance was what HP was after in the 1970’s."
SoS is a form of Silicon on Insulator, a manufacturing method that is very common in today’s IC’s (using Silicon Dioxide)
Really? As far as I know SoI is still somewhat specialised and although there may be huge quantities of some ICs produced using it, the majority of designs are still bulk silicon.
AMD used SoI for their CPUs from 130nm through 32nm. IBM has also done a lot of SoI chips, and GlobalFoundries is still marketing FD-SOI for things like RF applications.
Non-SOI is more common than SOI. IBM uses SOI. There's also a lot of use of it in chips with RF functionality onboard as it's supposedly better for that. The original company behind that sapphire variant is also still around:
> Even today the HP 3000 is supported by a third party (Stromasys) who makes an emulator allowing native MPE programs to run on a modern Intel processor.
Seems the article answered that question and gives a starting point for your search. Good luck and write up your experience if you feel inclined! :)
I read the article. I was expecting something more like MESS. Also, an image from where the OS can run or be installed is needed. Not sure what's the license status. The latest I can run on my Hercules is MVS 3.8j.
There's a SIMH HP3000 Series III emulator too that runs old MPE. At the moment the SIMH software kits site seems to be down, but the OS image is there.
http://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=581
http://www.hpmuseum.net/exhibit.php?class=3&cat=33