The PERQ Computer

I scrounged one in ~1991 from the back corridors of Manchester Uni; fun machine; the CPU was a bitsliced type, common at the time using AMD chips, the microcode was loaded at boot (hence the different microcodes on the different OSs). It used a z80 on the IO board to get things started and load the microcode off disc. The UI on PNX was pretty nice as well for a machine with 1MB of RAM. My Perq 1, had it's 14" belt driven hard drive 27MB (early Seagate), with PNX on - try fitting a Unix system with a GUI on that these days!

I was not aware that between Alto and Lisa there was the PERQ, a first commercial attempt, so thanks for point that out.

Of course the deeper you dig anywhere, the more complexity gets unearthed, and the more fair credit must be distributed across more clever engineers, dilluting the "single genius" picture that movie makers and often sadly also journalists try to portray ("reality distortion field").

I would quite like a minimalistic b/w GUI as the PERQ had on the screen shot.

Leaving out all the transparency/rounded corners nonsense this should be bleeding fast, too, with today's graphics capabilities.

EDIT: typo fixed

Excellently written history on a period of time I am fascinated in.

However, I think the author puts too fine a point on the literal exact geographic position of the technology, and not the historical & material forces that manifested. Obviously every computer advancement didn't occur in sunny Palo Alto directly (just reading where your device was "assembled" will tell you that). But even this article trying to highlight the other places where all of this was going on; the author cannot be unburdened by the massive forces coming out of the Bay Area. This is most obvious when the author has to mention Xerox PARC but not interrogate _why_ Xerox chose that of all locations to let them start a "wild unsupervised west-coast lab".

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

Very much a personal nitpick on a very well written entry so I hope this doesn't come off overly negative.

The Computer History Museum's long form interview with Avie Tevanian is a good resource for this era.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwCdKU9uYnE

I used one in the mid eighties, the SERC scattered them around British unis. The vertical hard drive had a wierd sparky engine when it spun, and it used graphics ram to compile so it scribbled over the display compiling C.

I used it's animated icon tool "cedra" to make tintin's captain haddock blow smoke out his ears.

We had the icl jv one. A beauty in reddish brown and cream. Made outside edinburgh near dalkeith I believe

There is some emulation available for the PERQ A1 in PERQemu https://github.com/jdersch/PERQemu/tree/master/PERQemu

Someone also added the PERQ A1 to Mame in 0.192, but as of now it is still marked as MACHINE_IS_SKELETON

We had at least 1 PERQ at the University of Waterloo in the early 1980's A friend of mine was helping the local IT folks set it up - arranging to read a 9" tape of PERQ's BitBlit software. A bunch of us wanted to see the machine first-hand but lowly undergrads didn't have access to the lab-room. But, wait ... is that acoustic tile above the door jam, only half-way across? Gimme a boost ... skinniest guy goes up and over ... we can SEE ;-)

I have the strange feeling I'm going to end up seeing one of these today at the Midwest Vintage Computer Festival, though I've never heard of them before. Amazing stuff, thanks for sharing this!

I'm glad they didn't start out with only 128 K of RAM, that would have sucked.

As part of the SPICE project there was an implementation of Lisp on the machines. This implementation became CMU Common Lisp. CMU Common Lisp is still available, but it also served as the jumping off point for Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) which is today the top free Common Lisp implementation.

It's interesting there's a heritage of code stretching all the way back to these old machines, although of course the changes since then have been massive.

Can someone who used one comment on what GUI elements were actually in a PERQ?

I see windows and bitmap graphics in the screenshots I can find.

But I don't see menus, a desktop, standardized buttons, scroll bars, etc. In other words I don't see the hallmarks of the Xerox Star, Apple Lisa, and Macintosh. It looks influenced by the Xerox products but not as advanced.

Chilton Computing: Single User Systems - Overview: https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acd/sus/

PERQ Reference Manual: http://www.vonhagen.org/perqsystems/perq-cpu-ref.pdf

PERQ Workstations: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/perq/RD_Davis/Davis-PERQ_Workst...

PERQ FAQ: http://www.vonhagen.org/perq-gen-faq.html

PERQ History -- Overview: https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acd/sus/perq_history/

PERQ Publicity: https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acd/sus/perq_pr/

PERQ System Users Short Guide: https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acd/pdfs/perq_p001.pdf

More PERQ notes (click "Further Reading" for more pages): https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acd/literature/notes/di...

PERQ Book: Contents: https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acd/literature/books/pe...

  1. Perq System Users Short Guide
  2. Perq files information
  3. Editor Quick Guide Guide
  4. Perq Pascal Extensions
  5. Perq Pascal Extensions Addendum
  6. Perq Hard Disk Primer
  7. Perq Operating System Programmers Guide
  8. Perq QCode Reference Manual
  9. Perq Microprogrammers Guide
  10. Perq Fault Dictionary
  11. Installation Guide
  12. New PERQ Tablet and Cursor Interface
  13. System B.1 Stream Package
  14. Changes to Pix in System B.1
  15. Installation of POS Version B.1

Related:

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

>"Processor

The PERQ CPU was a microcoded discrete logic design, rather than a microprocessor. It was based around 74S181 bit-slice ALUs and an Am2910 microcode sequencer. The PERQ CPU was unusual in having 20-bit wide registers and a writable control store (WCS), allowing the microcode to be redefined.[4] The CPU had a microinstruction cycle period of 170 ns (5.88 MHz).[5]"

A nit with TFA: the cpu board didn’t “emulate” P-Code, that was the native machine language. It was a “PASCAL machine” like the way we think of the Lisp Machine.

So the cpu board was all logic chips implementing the P-Code machine language, it wasn’t a cpu chip with supporting logic.

That gives you an idea of computing in the old days.

Back in the day PASCAL was the main teaching language at CMU.

(Edit) There seems to be some pushback on what I’m pointing out here, but it’s true, the cpu board is not built around a cpu chip, they built a microcode sequencer, ALU, etc to execute a p-code variant.

You can read about it here: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/perq/PERQ_CPU_Tech_Ref.pdf

Schematics here: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/perq/perq1/PERQ1A_Schematics/03_CPU...

Pic: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/perq/perq1/PERQ1A_PCB_Pics/CPU_top....

Fascinating. I started undergrad at CMU in 1996 and immediately got jobs doing computer support. I came across many old Macs and even an old VAX from the 1980s, but had never heard of a PERQ. By then all the Andrew machines were either HP Apollos running HP-UX or Sun SPARCstation 4s and 5s running SunOS or early Solaris.

It’s fascinating to me how after forty years we are still piecing together that genealogy like it’s some ancient scriptures. And keeping it scattered in blog posts and forum threads like this one.

It is funny how the 1970s computer industry was much more geographically inclusive than it is today. Heck, even IBM alone was more geographically inclusive than the industry is today.

https://bitsavers.org/pdf/perq/PERQ_Brochure.pdf - this has a price list for the computer. $19200 in 1980-s dollars.

One option stands out: "Memory Parity Option - $500". Ahh... How the times don't change, with the ECC RAM being a premium feature.

I remember seeing the PERQ at trade shows. The best thing about the PERQ was its monitor, which was unusually sharp for that era. It used a yellow-white long persistence phosphor. A CMU grad student friend told me that the monitor designer was “a close personal friend of the electron”, implying that the analog circuitry of the PERQ monitor was especially high quality.

Oh, the PERQ. I never saw one, although I came across most of the weird machines of that era. Lucasfilm bought a number of them. They were so unhappy with them that they ran a large display ad offering them for sale to get rid of them. There must be a story there, but I don't know it. Anyone remember PERQ at Lucasfilm?

screen capture of the present day PERQ emulator running a demo shown originally at SIGGRAPH 1982

https://imgur.com/gallery/3-rivers-computer-corporation-perq...

The predecessor to the "Blit" at Bell Labs was originally named the "Jerq" as a rude play on "Perq" borrowed by permission from Lucasfilm, and the slogan was "A Jerq at Every Desk".

Blit (computer terminal):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blit_(computer_terminal)

>The folk etymology for the Blit name is that it stands for Bell Labs Intelligent Terminal, and its creators have also joked that it actually stood for Bacon, Lettuce, and Interactive Tomato. However, Rob Pike's paper on the Blit explains that it was named after the second syllable of bit blit, a common name for the bit-block transfer operation that is fundamental to the terminal's graphics.[2] Its original nickname was Jerq, inspired by a joke used during a demo of a Three Rivers' PERQ graphic workstation and used with permission.

https://inbox.vuxu.org/tuhs/CAKzdPgz37wwYfmHJ_7kZx_T=-zwNJ50...

  From: Rob Pike <robpike@gmail.com>
  To: Norman Wilson <norman@oclsc.org>
  Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
  Subject: Re: [TUHS] Blit source
  Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2019 11:26:47 +1100 [thread overview]
  Message-ID: <CAKzdPgz37wwYfmHJ_7kZx_T=-zwNJ50PhS7r0kCpuf_F1mDkww@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
  In-Reply-To: <1576714621.27293.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org>

  [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 890 bytes --]

  Your naming isn't right, although the story otherwise is accurate.

  The Jerq was the original name for the 68K machines hand-made by Bart. The
  name, originally coined for a fun demo of the Three Rivers Perq by folks at
  Lucasfilm, was borrowed with permission by us but was considered unsuitable
  by Sam Morgan as we reached out to make some industrially, by a company
  (something Atlantic) on Long Island. So "Blit" was coined. The Blit name
  later stuck unofficially to the DMD-5620, which was made by Teletype and,
  after some upheavals, had a Western Electric BellMac 32000 CPU.

  If 5620s were called Jerqs, it was an accident. All the software with that
  name would be for the original, Locanthi-built and -designed 68K machines.

  The sequence is thus Jerq, Blit, DMD-5620. DMD stood for dot-mapped rather
  than bit-mapped, but I never understood why. It seemed a category error to
  me.

  -rob

https://inbox.vuxu.org/tuhs/CAKzdPgxreqfTy+55qc3-Yx5zZPVVwOW...

  The original name was Jerq, which was first the name given by friends at
  Lucasfilm to the Three Rivers PERQ workstations they had, for which the
  Pascal-written software and operating system were unsatisfactory. Bart
  Locanthi and I (with Greg Chesson and Dave Ditzel?) visited Lucasfilm in
  1981 and we saw all the potential there with none of the realization. My
  personal aha was that, as on the Alto, only one thing could be running at a
  time and that was a profound limitation. When we began to design our answer
  to these problems a few weeks later, we called Lucasfilm to ask if they
  minded us borrowing their excellent rude name, and they readily agreed.

  Our slogan: A jerq at every desk.