Thomas AdamMay 29
Tom Stepleton

Belated announcement: this weekend I will be at https://retrofest.uk with my #PERQ 2T2 graphical workstation from 1984, which (after months of troubleshooting, which I promise to describe someday) appears to have been working just now. I've successfully booted

  • PNX - a System III Unix by ICL with a pre-X11 GUI
  • POS - a simple DOS-like OS that was more popular in the US
  • RSRE Flex - made by MoD researchers and one of the weirdest OSs I have ever experienced

My exhibit could be one of the first public displays of Flex in a few decades, and I'm excited to show it off. Come early for best odds of seeing it working, as the PERQ is prone to hardware failure. If the machine breaks, I'll have the emulator handy, and if you can't make it, I'll also be giving a whole talk on Flex at #emfcamp in July. Hope to see you soon!

May 28 at 10:50pmWeb
Show threadTom StepletonMay 28
PS: I have (small) Three Rivers Computer Corporation stickers to hand out!
Show threadTom StepletonMay 30
The #PERQ has made it through Day 1 of RetroFest in Swindon with no major failures. I suspect a hard drive cable needs a new connector, but if the drive (emulator) is positioned like so and doesn't get jostled, then things seem to work. We'll see how far we can go on Day 2...
Show threadmauvedeityMay 31
@stepleton so good to see a machine I had never heard of! Watching the whiteboard for updates.
Show threadSkeezics BoondoggleJun 2

@stepleton Did you ever get audio output working (without the original landscape monitor)? This is too late to try out at RetroFest, but I've collected up some of the audio samples so you can hear more than just the bleeps and blorps from some of the games:

https://github.com/skeezicsb/PERQmedia/tree/master/SpeechDemo

Works a treat with the "g6mic" or "g6mfm" disk images bundled with the emulator. Cheers!

PERQmedia/SpeechDemo at master · skeezicsb/PERQmedia

Additional media and software for use with PERQemu - skeezicsb/PERQmedia

GitHub
Show threadTom StepletonJun 2

@skeezicsb Sorta! I had another disk image with some sounds (at two separate bitrates so sometimes you got the ssslllooowww ppplllaaayyybbbaaaccckk), and while it was buggy once (the audio hardware seemed to be half-wave rectifying the audio), the problem hid itself of course when I was starting to chase it down. Then the Big Bugs that I was dealing with prior to the show cropped up, blocking any further investigation. I haven't looked into it since.

I saw the audio capability in the PERQemu changelog; congrats! Will try out the linked items soon.

"This is PERQ. Feed me! FEED ME!" iirc.

Show threadSkeezics BoondoggleJun 3

@stepleton You _read_ the changelog? <faints>

This version of Talker includes a 'fast' option so you can play the big 32kHz music files at the right speed. :-) Of course, until I port Bad Apple the task is incomplete.

Glad to see the machine behaved itself at least some of the time during RetroFest!

Show threadTom StepletonJun 3

@skeezicsb It even worked once I got it back home, if you can believe it!

I will film Bad Apple running on actual hardware. I hope your efforts involve special Bad Apple microcode so that we're rendering at a full 1280x1024.

Show threadArt Na Crea 🇮🇪 May 29

@stepleton

I used one of these at the Computing Laboratory at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in the 1980s.

We had a whole raft of different Unix systems that we worked on as we built and tested The Newcastle Connection system.

I'd forgotten about the Flex version but someone did play with it.

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

Newcastle Connection - Wikipedia

Show threadArt Na Crea 🇮🇪 May 29

@stepleton

We also had some of these Blits and I believe they were originally called the Jerq as a reference to the Three Rivers Perq which was the original ICL Perq.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr1XXvSaVUQ

BLIT: an early Windowed Graphic Interface from Bell Labs - AT&T Archives

YouTube
Show threadTom StepletonMay 29
@artnacrea I have also heard that!
Show threadTom StepletonMay 29
@artnacrea That's really interesting; I'd be keen to know more sometime. PNX 5.03 (which I plan to run at the show!) appears to have shipped with the Newcastle Connection (search for "Newcastle" here). It seems like a friendly and clever design and I'd be interested to try it sometime... if I ever get the courage to work with the PERQ's ethernet hardware!
PNX 5.03 manual pages

Show threadTom StepletonMay 29
@artnacrea One sec: when you say "the Flex version", do you mean there was a Flex version of the Newcastle Connection?
Show threadArt Na Crea 🇮🇪 May 29

@stepleton

No, I didn't mean to imply that. We had more than one Perq and one of them had Flex running on it at some time.

I didn't personally inhale!

It's late in New Zealand and I'm away for the weekend. Happy to chat sometime next week.

Show threadJonasMay 29

@stepleton
The UI of that OS look amazing!

Did you ever tried a Genode-based OS like #Sculpt? It's pleinty weird too, in a good way

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

Genode - Wikipedia

Show threadJonasMay 29
@stepleton
The UI looks like one of @neauoire #adelie slides ^^