The Web Site to Remember National Semiconductor's Series 32000 Family | Hacker News Reader

The Web Site to Remember National Semiconductor's Series 32000 Family

cpu-ns32k.net

34 pointspicture10 comments

https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...

Oral History of Les Kohn, one of the two designers of the NS32000 microarchitecture (the other being Dan O'Dowd). He discusses it and the Xerox PARC inspired network-connected workstation on pages 9-14.

That would be this Dan O'Dowd: https://dawnproject.com

It's great that there is an open-source Verilog implementation for FPGAs (running at 50MHz, highly respectable compared to ~30MHz hardware) and apparently a NetBSD version that will run on it.

Got a hold of a NS32081 and put in on protoboard in my turbo 8088 PC, interfacing via the 8-bit I/O bus (late 1980's.) Wrote a simple Turbo-C interface to read/write FPU instructions and data. Operations with 32-bit floats were about 4x faster than Turbo-C's floating point emulation. Was straightforward to program as I recall. But I can't recall where that protoboard went...

I used an Encore Multimax in my college parallel programming class that ran a proprietary UNIX on a member of this processor family.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encore_Computer#Specificatio...

One of my courses at UIUC used a Sequent Balance 8000, which also ran on the NS32K (and was a direct competitor). Ours was a 6-CPU system, and it had no problems handling system loads that would have brought the neighboring Pyramid 90x to its knees. We were only using it for general programming coursework and not for anything specific to parallel programming, but it was head and shoulders above the usual systems.

I thought Dynix was x86-only, but I guess not.

The wiki for Dynix doesn't appear to know any of this.

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

The Sequent wiki does have a paragraph on the Balance.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequent_Computer_Systems#Bal...

I was pleased to see a page with photos (and PDF documentation) of the Ceres systems which were used to develop the Oberon operating system.

http://cpu-ns32k.net/Ceres.html

The 32032 was my favorite CPU as a kid. Today, thanks to eBay, I actually own one!

I thought National Semi was the company founded/run by that renown dirtbag CEO who among other things told some nuns to eat shit, but that was actually Cypress Semi

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._J._Rodgers

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