[Coco] Good news...

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 27 August 2016 11:20:51 Dave Philipsen wrote:

> He's well into retirement age but he apparently still does some
> consulting as he seems to be affiliated with a particular company. I
> didn't get into an extended discussion with him but he did give me his
> opinion on Motorola processors:
>
> "Motorola had the best microprocessors but other companies had better
> salesmen. Otherwise there might be a 68million in every PC and phone."
>
>
> Dave

And thats a point I'll never argue.  The 68040, given the die shrinks and 
the speedups that would allow, would easily kick a lot of the small box 
stuff to the curb.

Even hitachi didn't see a future in a shrunk, wider address and databus 
versions of the 6309.  It could show all these arm cortex multicore cpus 
the short way home.

The instruction set of those two 8 bitters, if carried to a wider address 
bus of 128 bits, with a 64 bit data bus, and the addition of a 64 bit 
barrel shifter for bit twiddling, would be an arm killer yet today.

But sadly, its a war that moto had decided not to fight by the time the 
last amiga's were sealed in shipping boxes just north of me in PA. By 
then amiga R&D had ceased, and moto's biggest customer was busy moving 
the accounts and any money left to the Bahama's.

Those of us who needed the rendering power took the bait and bought the 
68060 card, but got a few surprises as its instruction set had been 
eviscerated so code that ran fine on the 000 thru the 040's, crashed on 
the 060's. It had a replacement for the major crash causer, and a German 
prof found it, and wrote a binary search and substitute that worked well 
so the library's on its hard drives have all been patched.  But about 
the time your arm was sore from patting ourselves on the back, another 
problem came to the fore.

It seems their assembly people had been taught bass ackwards, and every 
single one of the 6.3 volt rated bypass capacitors on that board were 
installed reversed polarity.  Some of them even blew up!  With my tools 
of the day, I was most of a day replacing them all with more like them, 
but installed with the right polarity. Then it was 24hr+ uptimes.  Since 
it had stuff going on all night, executed by the EzCron Jim Hines and I 
co-wrote, the first thing it did after the 11 pm news was reboot itself 
and get right to the video rendering of some commercials.  I have the 
quickest of those machines in my basement right now, has several drives, 
some occupying the space for the PSU in that A-4000-060, 2 drive cards, 
a kitchen sync, and a toaster And IIRC 64 megs of dram.  But sadly, 
someone threw out all the docs AND the custom wired up power supply I 
had made for it due to its original's fading 5 volt supply.

As for Bud Pass, anyone who took his compo sci classes, was IMNSHO, being 
taught by a true master of the craft.  I am glad he is still with us.

> On 8/26/2016 10:16 PM, Kip Koon wrote:
> > Hi Dave,
> > Excellent!  That is great news!  What is Bud Pass up to these days? 
> > Any programming projects?
> >
> > Kip Koon
> > computerdoc at sc.rr.com
> > http://www.cocopedia.com/wiki/index.php/Kip_Koon
> >
> >> -----Original Message-----
> >> From: Coco [mailto:coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com] On Behalf Of Dave
> >> Philipsen Sent: Friday, August 26, 2016 5:31 PM
> >> To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts
> >> Subject: [Coco] Good news...
> >>
> >> Good news for any of you who have been wanting cross assemblers
> >> that were written by Bud Pass of Computer Systems Consultants. I
> >> have finally got in touch with him and he has agreed to make them
> >> available to all of us.  More details to come...
> >>
> >> Dave Philipsen
> >>
> >> --
> >> Coco mailing list
> >> Coco at maltedmedia.com
> >> https://pairlist5.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/coco


Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>