On Thursday, April 21, 2016 9:22 AM, "Tapley, Mark" <mtap...@swri.edu> wrote:
On Apr 20, 2016, at 9:46 PM, dwight <dkel...@hotmail.com> wrote: > The RTX-2000 was an of shoot of the NC4000. Even at 10MHz, they could > out compute a 40MHz 80386. > One execution per clock cycle plus possibly using 3 16 bit busses in a single > cycle. > A 4MHz NC4000 could sort 1K 16 bit values in 19.7 milliseconds. > Dwight > > …. > On 2016-04-20 1:28 PM, dwight wrote: >> There was a Harris RTX-2000 based accelerator card around >> the 80386 time period. > > ...Interestingly: "The RTX 2000 is specifically designed to execute the > Forth language" > (https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/stack_computers/sec4_5.html) > > --Toby (top-post …. bottom-post …. AAagh!) :-) The Harris RTX-2010, in a rad-hard version, was for years the CPU of choice for spacecraft science instruments from Johns Hopkins APL. Those chips are *all* *over* the solar system! One of APL's lead SW engineers wrote one of the most widely-used Forth test suites, partly for that reason. It’s a pretty nice chip, for multiple reasons. - Mark This chip was also used in some industrial equipment. In school, I worked with an MRI system that used this chip for the controller. It was programmed in a C-like language using a C-to-FORTH compiler. I used to have a manual for the RTX-2000, but sent it off to someone on comp.lang.forth to scan. I wonder if it ever got scanned and placed on the net. Come to think of it, I think I have one of these chips lying around, but no software. I think MPE still supports this chip with their forth compiler system, but it's expensive. I wonder if anyone has anything non-commercial that would run on it. Dave