IP: more on also WORTH READING History of 8008?

[Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>]

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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.




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