O.T. Dennis Ritchie, co-inventor of UNIX and C has died

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meridian

Member
Maybe not so O.T.

How are the Picaxes made? What sort of machines and what O.S. do they use?
How about the Basic interpreter/compiler, what language are they written in?
Maybe Unix and C are integral parts of Picaxes.
 
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Janne

Senior Member
I also wonder if the picaxe firmware is written in C.. or do the guys and gals at rev-ed like to torture themselves and have an excercise in pic assembler and the fun of W-register :)
 
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Marcwolf

Senior Member
Sad to hear that. I still have an original K&R book around somewhere.
I remember the early ports of Unix and the variants like AT&T, SCO, Xenix etc in the days before Linux.

Thanks for letting us know.
Dave
 
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fritz42_male

Senior Member
I used to sell Altos SCO Xenix and Unix systems and I miss those days. Superfast response times with 30+ simultaneous users on an 80286 processor! (actually a multiprocessor system as the hard disk controller had it's own 286 and ram and so did the serial port boards.

Ah the pleasure of the Bourne shell, cron commands etc.

Rip mate, you did a lot for the world.
 
M

meridian

Member
So, Technical, how about a webpage with pics?

meridian said:
How are the Picaxes made? What sort of machines and what O.S. do they use?
How about the Basic interpreter/compiler, what language are they written in?
Maybe Unix and C are integral parts of Picaxes.
Click to expand...
I am sure a lot of users would like an explanation of the whole lots of processes behind the making of their Picaxe. How about a webpage showing the process from go-to-whoa, starting with the silicon wafer down to the chips coming off the assembly line??? Scenes of blissful Rev-Ed staff coming up with ideas for the nexr versions, etc, etc.
 
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pha555

Senior Member
I worked at Bell Labs in the mid 70s and with our first Intel 8008 we did hand assembly. Within a month someone had written an assembler for us and shortly thereafter someone had adapted a C compiler to Intel use. I learned C from a tattered copy of a memo by Ritchie.

Ritchie was rightfully held in awe. A genius.

I have a photo of our first machine at http://www.phanderson.com/fecc.jpg . Used 24 256 byte EEPROMs and 1.5K of 8-bit RAM implemented using 1K X 1 power hungry chips.

This cost over $10,000 but actually replaced some $200,000 worth of relays and crossbar switches. This was a two person development. Fun times!

Peter Anderson
 
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papaof2

Senior Member
pha555 said:
I worked at Bell Labs in the mid 70s. I have a photo of our first machine at http://www.phanderson.com/fecc.jpg . Used 24 256 byte EEPROMs and 1.5K of 8-bit RAM implemented using 1K X 1 power hungry chips.

This cost over $10,000 but actually replaced some $200,000 worth of relays and crossbar switches. This was a two person development. Fun times!

Peter Anderson
Click to expand...
Ancestor of the one of the ESS machines?

I taught maintenance courses for the 4A, 4A ETS, and 4 ESS Toll Switches for several years, then did remote 4 ESS support for a while before winding up in a "skunk works" development group in Atlanta. The development group was an interesting place, as we "inherited" abandoned projects (often using ancient technology - BASIC in DOS using an in-house library to talk to a 3270 card for mainframe access and a standard modem for Unix access so it could process requests between the two systems) and nearly always provided repair or replacement. It's also the only job that let me stay in the same place, at the same desk, and get two promotions because of company dofferences. When Bell Labs discovered our group, they said all such development should be under their umbrella - but programmers there were a half-step up the corporate ladder from those at AT&T. When the Labs later decided we were a little too quirky even for them, we all went back to AT&T - but they couldn't demote us a half-level so everyone moved up to the next level.

Sometimes you just gotta love corporate inconsistency ;-)

John
 
W

westaust55

Moderator
meridian said:
I am sure a lot of users would like an explanation of the whole lots of processes behind the making of their Picaxe.
Click to expand...
The PICAXE chips are based upon PIC chips made by Microchip who may better explain the physical chip creation process.
Exactly which chips - see manual 1 (currently V7.7) page 16 which explains this (have you read that?) and some recent threads for more on the new M2 series chips.

Rev Ed then install proprientary firmware which provides the boot loader to download the program and the interpreter program to read the downloaded tokenised program code and perform the necessary machine code/assembler level instruction to emulate the funtion of the BASIC command being executed.
Much of this has been discussed in previous thread on this forum.
Since the firmware is proprientary Rev Ed is not going to divulge the exact details of how it all works.
 
F

fritz42_male

Senior Member
meridian said:
Scenes of blissful Rev-Ed staff coming up with ideas for the nexr versions, etc, etc.
Click to expand...
I can picture that now....

A back street pub, 3 or 4 seedy, unshaven characters slumped around a table full of glasses, overflowing ashtrays and schematics on beer mats and the back of fag packets. Every now and again, a head will raise, mutter 'how about...' then shake his head, emit a beery belch and sink back down again.

Blissful indeed!
 
Technical

Technical

Technical Support
Staff member
Janne said:
I also wonder if the picaxe firmware is written in C.. or do the guys and gals at rev-ed like to torture themselves and have an excercise in pic assembler and the fun of W-register :)
Click to expand...
All PICAXE firmware is written in assembler direct. This is not actually that uncommon for microcontroller programming, many commercial microcontroller projects are developed in assembler.
The main reason for us is quite simply that, particularly on the early PICAXE devices, the C compilers were simply far too inefficient for the very limited program memory space/RAM available. You can squeeze in a lot more features when working in assembler.

And there are no beards in the PICAXE HQ.
 
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Marcwolf

Senior Member
fritz42_male said:
I can picture that now....

A back street pub, 3 or 4 seedy, unshaven characters slumped around a table full of glasses, overflowing ashtrays and schematics on beer mats and the back of fag packets. Every now and again, a head will raise, mutter 'how about...' then shake his head, emit a beery belch and sink back down again.

Blissful indeed!
Click to expand...
Don't laugh.
You'd be surprised the number of inspirations that come from a relaxed informal atmosphere. Sometime a flight of fancy contain the seeds of a new idea, and then someone starts to create what was once considered the impossible.

An interesting study was once done. A company decided that too much time was spent in the companies tea/coffee making area so they had a 'tea lady' to bring the drinks around to the desk. Surprisingly productivity dropped off?.
Why, well it was found that when people from different departments met at the tea area they would often discuss issues they were having, and sometimes some surprising cross pollination of idea's occured which offered solutions.

Just my 2 pints worth - and make it Cider.
Dave
 
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Marcwolf

Senior Member
fritz42_male said:
Does Rev-Ed accept visitors to the Bath offices? I'm back in the UK next year and wouldn't mind dropping in.
Click to expand...
Well - you first take the BUS to this TERMINAL, get a POINTER to this ADDRESS and then REGISTER at the COUNTER. Then you can ask for Tech AND Hippy OR each of them individually depending on what BIT of information you want.
Afterwards pop down to the local for a BYTE.

A digital quip.
Dave
 
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