Old Vintage Computing Research

Just a brief programming note. Before this blog there was Floodgap Retrobits, and I still maintain those pages. One of the earliest was my Tomy Tutor-specific page devoted to my very first computer which we got in 1983. Relatives of the Texas Instruments home computers and closely patterned after the unreleased TI 99/8, the history of the Japanese models is relatively well-known and there are a number of Japanese enthusiasts that specialize in the Pyuuta, the Tutor's ancestor system. On the other hand, hardly anybody knows anything about the British version. That system is the Grandstand Tutor: The only good photographs of this machine, which may never actually have been released to the public, and the only known information on its history appear in Your Computer October 1983, at that time one of the major home computer magazines in the UK. The original form of this machine was very similar to the Pyuuta, which emphasized its TMS9918A-based built-in paint program and due to its specialization on graphics only implements a very simplified animation-oriented dialect of BASIC called GBASIC. Adam Imports rebadged many Asian and some American toys and games for the UK (and, for some period of time, New Zealand) and had a particularly close relationship with Tomy. In fact, the relationship was close enough that Adam in fact rejected this initial version as uncompetitive with other home computers and sent it back to Tomy for a more upgraded BASIC. Tomy provided this by modifying TI Extended BASIC, calling it Tomy BASIC and implementing it as a second mode accessible from the system's menu-based interface. The absence of Tomy BASIC places the earliest Grandstand Tutor prior to the American Tomy Tutor, which also has the upgraded Tomy BASIC. Tomy subsequently sold this upgrade in at least two forms as an option for the Japanese machines as well.

The interesting part is that while PAL Tutors have been documented to exist (the American Tutor is obviously NTSC), no one yet has reported finding a Grandstand. It wouldn't be hard to distinguish one — the photograph has obvious Grandstand branding on its silver badge. It's possible they were never released at all because even accounting for publishing delays, the second Grandstand would have emerged late in 1983, hitting in the wake of the video game crash and against heavier hitters like the Commodore VIC-20 and Commodore 64 as well as (in the UK) the ZX Spectrum. Adam may have simply concluded it wasn't a strong enough competitor even with the upgraded BASIC to sell.

I also finally got off my pasty white tuckus and scanned and OCRed the rest of the Tomy Tutor User Group newsletters in my possession (I also redid #2 and #9 with OCR). The TTUG is a great example, in my humble opinion, of the variety and importance of computer user groups in the early home computer years. Our family got one of these flyers as a registered user; Gene Dinovo, the president of the club, sent out over two thousand of them to everyone on Tomy's mailing list. Just like any user group would have done in those days, the newsletter collected type-in programs, news, tutorials, high score tables, and software and peripherals for sale, including original software written by the user group's own members. Especially for orphaned systems, and there were a lot back then besides the Tutor, the reassurance that "you are not alone" went a long way to helping people still make the most out of an expensive purchase that would otherwise have become a gilded doorstop.

Finally, and almost anticlimatically, I've added updates to the Solbourne Solace with various details and corrections submitted by former Solbourne engineer Dworkin Müller. Solbourne Computer was a relatively early SPARC licensee and one of Sun's most important competitors in the first few years of the 1990s, possessing an initially formidable lead in the performance sector due to their special multiprocessing sauce. OS/MP, Solbourne's bug-compatible licensed version of SunOS 4, let Solbourne buyers run their SunOS-compatible software out of the box with little or no compromises, including SunView. Later their IDT workstations, though uniprocessor, competed directly with and even could squeak by contemporary SPARCstations, at least in the beginning. Solbourne eventually ran out of money when they hit engineering limits with their own CPU and could never reclaim the throughput crown, abandoning the computer hardware market in 1994. We might be adding more remembrances as other Solbourne engineers are contacted.

You can see these updates at The Little Orphan Tomy Tutor as well as past Old VCR Tomy articles, and The Solbourne Solace as well as past Old VCR Solbourne-specific articles. Naturally, if you have anything to add, feel free to post in the comments or drop me E-mail at ckaiser at floodgap dawt com.

I've previously mentioned Solbourne Computer, which for a number of years was probably Sun's most significant early competitor in SPARC-based systems. Solbourne was the first to market in 1989 with multiprocessing SPARC servers based on their custom circuit-switched 108MB/s KBus interconnect, running a bespoke but highly compatible licensed SunOS 4.x clone named OS/MP; later, they even developed their own SPARC CPU, the benighted MN10501 "KAP" Kick-Ass Processor (yes, really). At least one Solbourne system even went on the Space Shuttle. Sun didn't have multiprocessor SPARCs until 1991 with the competing MBus-based Sun-4m systems.

My own affinity for them started when I had an account on a Series6 for a few months as an undergraduate college student and a few years later ended up with my own pizzabox S4000DX. I still have that machine, but my usual Sol is an S3000 portable workstation with that lovely garish gas plasma screen simply because it's so incredibly unique. In 1990, when this presentation slide was made, the sky seemed bright and the foundation seemed solid.

But by March 1992, cracks were showing, and now we have a view into that process then — a rare inside glimpse at the hardware development and executive management of a 1990s tech company. In a shipment of various Solbourne paraphernalia, a former employee from late in the company's dying days sent me a couple VHS tapes of corporate meetings. One of them will need some cleaning and rehabilitation, but the other was in good condition and absolutely playable, and I was able to digitize it on the Power Mac G5 Quad with my trusty Canopus ADVC-300. These are second-generation copies and the quality is worse than usual, but they tell the story adequately and serve as a fascinating time capsule of the company's later doom and nineties-era enterprise computing generally.

Did a few updates to the Solbourne Solace thanks to new stuff people have sent in, Solbourne of course being one of Sun's most notable competitors in SPARC-based workstations and servers. The most interesting new entry is the space-faring PILOT ("Portable In-flight Landing Operations Trainer") laptop, reported by Scott Manley who noted it in Space Shuttle mission photographs. While the SPARC Solbourne S3000 portable workstation is well-known, this was the only known Solbourne laptop and its only colour portable, although it carried both Solbourne and Panasonic badges (Matsushita, owner of the Panasonic brand, had a majority stake in Solbourne), and was most likely designed and manufactured by Matsushita's Federal Systems division under contract instead of Solbourne in Longmont, Colorado. NASA commissioned it as a portable simulator to ensure that the Space Shuttle commander and pilot could maintain their skills in orbit, and it flew at least from October 1993 to March 1995 (the pictures above are from STS-62 and STS-63; it was documented on STS-58, -61, -62, -63, -65 and -67).

The machine had 32MB of RAM, a 15" colour LCD and a dedicated "Rotational Hand Controller." The software was NASA's own Shuttle Engineering Simulator (SES), ported to SPARC from the Control Data Corporation Cyber 180 Model 962 (an upgraded version of the RISC Cyber 180-960) at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and ran on OS/MP 4.1A, Solbourne's equivalent of SunOS 4.1.1. Its motherboard was most likely a Solbourne "pizzabox" IDT logic board, the same one used in the S3000, S4000 and S4100 which directly competed with O.G. SPARCstations, making the reported speed of 40MHz suspect since the Panasonic MN10501 KAP (short for "Kick-Ass Processor" — yes, really) was notoriously unstable above 36MHz. A suspiciously similar laptop called the Matsushita P2100 was announced in 1992 but by then Sun was making moves to freeze SPARC clone makers out of the market, particularly Solbourne who had cornerned the more profitable upper tiers, and refused to license Solaris to anyone like they did SunOS. (Apple later pulled this same stunt with the Mac clones and Mac OS 8.) The P2100 doesn't seem to have been ever released, and while a few PILOT examples were likely fabricated, no one so far has found one. PILOT was eventually replaced by various IBM ThinkPads which went on to have a well-known and illustrious career in space.

A big thanks to Warner Losh and Dieter Dworkin Müller for the probable scoop on PILOT, as well as Scott's own research and his initial report, and this unofficial NASA description from 1994.

Who needs a jack-o-lantern when you've got a bright orange gas plasma display? This is a 1990 Solbourne Computer S3000 all-in-one workstation based around the 33MHz Panasonic MN10501, irreverently code-named the Kick-Ass Processor or KAP. It is slightly faster than, and the S3000 and the related S4000 and later S4000DX/S4100 directly competed with, the original gangsta 1989 Sun SPARCstation and SPARCstation 1+. Solbourne was an early SPARC innovator through majority owner Matsushita, who was a SPARC licensee in competition with Fujitsu, and actually were the first to introduce multiprocessing to the SPARC ecosystem years before Sun themselves did. To do this and maintain compatibility, Solbourne licensed SunOS 4.x from Sun and rebadged it as OS/MP with support for SMP as well as their custom MMU and fixes for various irregularities in KAP, which due to those bugs was effectively limited to uniprocessor implementations. Their larger SMP systems used Fujitsu (ironically), Weitek and Texas Instruments CPUs; I have a Series5 chassis and a whole bunch of KBus cards Al Kossow gave me that I've got to assemble into a working system one of these days.

This particular machine is a fairly upgraded unit thanks in large part to Stephen Dowdy, formerly of the Solbourne Shack and the University of Colorado, where he maintained them. In particular, besides tons of OS stuff and documentation, the SBus RAM expander card giving this machine a total of 56MB ECC RAM came from his old S3000, and it also has a SCSI2SD along with a 256K L2 cache CPU module stolen from an S4100. The 1152x900 monochrome display is compatible with the SBus bwtwo. Just like I retain a great fondness for PA-RISC because it was my first job out of college, I have similar affection for Solbournes because one of my first undergraduate Unix accounts was on a department Series6.

KAP was an interesting processor with a great name, but its sometimes serious issues more or less directly led to Solbourne's demise as a computer manufacturer because Matsushita wouldn't let them walk away from its sunk design costs. Still, it was good competition when it was new and OS/MP was nearly 100% compatible with SunOS 4.x (4.1C, the final release, is equivalent with SunOS 4.1.3), so what you're really looking at is a SPARCstation "clone" of sorts with the hottest display this side of a Al Gore climate chart.

And it turns out that particular computing environment was really the intersection point for a lot of early GUI efforts, which were built and run on Sun workstations and thus will also run on the Solbourne. With some thought, deft juggling of PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH and a little bit of shell scripting, it's possible to create a single system that can run a whole bunch of them. That's exactly what reykjavik, this S3000, will be doing.