Texas Instruments Explorer Computer System (1984) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Texas Instruments Explorer Computer System (1984) [pdf]

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73 pointsmyth_drannon29 comments

I know this is real (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI_Explorer) but I can't shake the feeling that this is from a parallel universe or really good AI generated retro ad.

Does anyone actually remember this thing?

Jamie Zawinski was using it before working at Netscape: https://archive.is/vzeWI (not linking it directly since he doesn't like it)

"Back before the Computing Dark Ages of the Nineties began, I hacked on Lisp Machines. If you've still got an Explorer or Symbolics, you might find some of the stuff I wrote in the good old days useful. It's archived in the CMU AI Repository."

And you can still find his code there! Sometimes the internet proves it's not all junk:

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/ai-repository/ai/lang/...

“Fibre optic interface to monitor” ? I want to believe this is real, but it does seem like it’s from some parallel dimension.. All of it is plausible, I guess, just all of it together seems pretty far fetched..

The monitor and the main unit were supposed to be in different rooms.

There was room full of them at UMass in the late 80s, and a huge bundle of fiber than ran down the hall to the lab that used them.

And, there was a parts spare that I used when I took AI :-)

In the 1980's sending several megaHerz signals over long copper wire was too difficult. So optic fibre was used. In those days Ethernet using thick coax cable was limited to 3MHz.

TI Explorer used it as standard, but similar option was available for Symbolics machines in place of IIRC BNC.

Both were used to put consoles (display, mouse, keyboard) in the office while the possibly much louder central units and any attending extra gear would be placed in a dedicated computer room.

Made more sense when you consider things like TI Explorer having optional DSP coprocessor card which might be paired with various RF hardware for realtime processing.

The actual machine was loud, hot, and used lots of electricity. It made sense to put the computer in an air conditioned room (along with its equally large and power-hungry disk drives) and use a long interconnect to place the console somewhere more conducive to humans getting work done. The CADR and the LMI Lambda did this with long copper cables, the Explorer and Symbolics (post-LM2) used fiber.

Yup! We had two of them. One of the groups engineers was doing early Expert System stuff on it. They were a very odd duck to try to get used to just sitting cold at the console, and not having much inkling about Lisp didn't help either. Otherwise I'd be able to give a more cogent recollection of the machine and its environment.

The only thing of note at the time was that it was still using 10base5 "thick" Ethernet. Boy, was that stuff nasty. Huge, ungainly cables, and large boxes with truly dangerous spikes in them. As I recall you had to measure spots on the cable to add new taps, you couldn't just stick them anywhere. We were all 10base2 at that point, so it was not friendly.

Also, with all the recent hub bub about NVIDIA and it's "AI Chips", TI was a pioneer here as well. They managed to squeeze the bulk of the TI Explorer Lisp Machine onto a single chip. 550K transistors I think, 256 pins. Huge. A real marvel. Some were suggesting putting these into cruise missiles. I was a bit dismayed that they want to blow up a chip like that.

Obviously, this was very early, but also it was AI Autumn at that point.

Shame the machines just sat there in the end, we were more interested in the Suns that we had.

Our ECMP dept at CWRU had a couple also. One of the students used its graphics to simulate and draw roaches and their walking neurons, experimenting with what happens when you turn off a leg.

There is also an ad for microExplorer/Macintosh II, but less AI hype - http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ti/microexplorer/microEXPLORER_... You can see the "AI chip" on page 5.

NuBus was also used both in Apple products, and the TI 1500 series of 68000-based UNIX minis.

I installed both 1500s, and the previous Xenix-386 1300s in franchise dealerships in the early 90s.

Is the TI machine in the parent article also a 68000?

EDIT: Hey, get a load of this!

"The NuBus was first developed commercially in the Western Digital NuMachine, and first used in a production product by their licensee, Lisp Machines, Inc., in the LMI-Lambda, a Lisp Machine. The project and the development group was sold by Western Digital to Texas Instruments in 1984. The technology was incorporated into their TI Explorer, also a Lisp Machine. In 1986, Texas Instruments used the NuBus in the S1500 multiprocessor UNIX system. Later, both Texas Instruments and Symbolics developed Lisp Machine NuBus boards (the TI MicroExplorer and the Symbolics MacIvory) based on their Lisp supporting microprocessors. These NuBus boards were co-processor Lisp Machines for the Apple Macintosh line (the Mac II and Mac Quadras)."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NuBus

>Is the TI machine in the parent article also a 68000?

No, it's a fully custom CPU architecture and implementation, though they could use a 68020 as the "LX" co-processor. Also their primary competitor Symbolics used two 68000s in addition to their custom CPU: one as an I/O and boot controller, another as the heart of their console i.e. a graphical terminal.

IIMU that the Explorer's 68K option was the same design as the NuMachine/Lambda 68K board with the addition of a license-protection PAL/ROM combination that prevented Unix from running if a matching paddlecard (containing the license key) was missing.

Real. I worked on a TI Explorer with IntelliCorp's Knowledge Engineering Environment (KEE) to develop a tool called Conceptual Design Representation (CODER) to help with US Air Force cockpit design.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Engineering_Enviro...

I got a copy of KEE with my Symbolics when I bought it in 2001 or so, but never had any idea what it was for or how to use it.

Some background on what it is:

https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:sv429hd6966/sv429hd69...

"Knowledge Engineering Environment KEE

KEE from Intellicorp is the most widely used of the high-end expert system development shells. It is available on Symbolics, Xerox and Texas Instruments Artificial Intelligence workstations, Apollo, DEC and Sun workstations, DEC VAX mini computers and 80386-based IBM PC-compatible computers.

It provides a powerful and sophisticated development environment, offering hierarchical object representation of data and rules, partitioning of the rulebase, an inference engine providing agenda-driven chaining in addition to backward and forward chaining, and a Truth Maintenance System for what-if and assumption-based reasoning. It offers a suite of development tools, such as specialized structured editors and several methods to build the data structures, including menus and an English-like construction language. A sophisticated graphics toolkit allows the creation of user interfaces which can be directly driven by the data values in the knowledge base."

I still have a paper copy of that brochure.

I had one too, but threw it out in the last house move.

Like others, I got to play with one at university, but my lab mate was the main user of that machine. [ I did have my own AT&T 3B2, though. ]

I worked on reverse-engineering it and helped work on an emulator for some time, but (at the time) the operating system for it was not available, only partial disk images from a machine that had crashed during software installation.

We did not know that until we got the emulation far enough to run into the errors though.

SISCOG in Lisbon started out developing their software on Explorer series Lisp Machines - these days they use Commo Lisp on Windows and Linux.

Their software is mainly used for timetabling, crew management etc in railways.

https://www.siscog.pt/en-gb/

Some dude is building an emulator for it https://lisp-machine.org/hacking-nevermore-a-ti-explorer-lis...

I don't think it's been worked on for some time; We both reached the same dead end in our emulation projects - The disk images we were working from were from a crashed machine and missing most of the operating system.

There were also some tape images for some packages, did anyone try reading them into the broken disk image?

No - To read the tapes in we needed the tape software and the tape software was only on the tape and not in the world loads we had. To generate a whole system from tape required TI-internal software named GENASYS, which was not released to customers. We contacted TI about this and they responded that they were actively searching for GENASYS internally at the time as they wanted to use it as prior art in some patent action. I don't remember what became of it.

I was real curious about this article yesterday and didn't see any comments.

Anyone have any idea what these cost when they came out? They seem like an unbelievably powerful/expensive machine for the year they came out.

Were they $50k, $100k, $500k?

I can't find any relevant documentation for Texas Instruments but their prices were in the same ballpark as their primary competitor Symbolics, and you can find them in this document: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/symbolics/history/Symbolics_Overvie...

So around $50-100k.

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