Talk:Alpha Microsystems

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Comments

There is so much more that could be said about Alpha Micro. We could have sections on their various software products (AlphaTCP, AlphaWRITE, AlphaCALC, etc...) and we could have models and so on along with what Alpha Micro is doing today (AMOS 8, TrueGUI and other cool stuff). And what about links to ZTERM and other supporting 3rd party software. 74.14.49.194 (talk) 04:00, 1 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Could we have a list of various historical models, along with some basic specifications? I used to use an AM-1000 (I think) in high school. I still have an 8" floppy disk from that era. It would be fun to read about it. But I have no info in the platform. Wadsworth 00:01, 11 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The Hawk disk drive was not a Winchester disk: The heads did not take off and land from the disk surface but retracted completely, and accordingly the removable pack contained only the platter, not the platter and arm assembly. See [1] for a dissection of one; the heads are shown at around 5:50. Hieronymus Illinensis (talk) 11:54, 2 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I used an A400 duirng my time at Exeter College between 1987 and 1989; re the DEC similarities, we used PPN IDs to log in, and the commandline was very similar to RSTS (I used a PDP11/44 running RSTS for my COBOL coursework). AlphaBAsic was similar to an enhanced DEC-BASICPLUS... — Preceding unsigned comment added by Alcockell (talk • contribs) 22:05, 2 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Alpha Microsystems revert

Sounds like we have an issue with our source, then. The very title of the Dr. Dobbs article is "A PDP-11-Like 16-Bit Micro for the S-100 Bus". Why would that make its operating system more like the PDP-10 than the PDP-11? Bumm13 (talk) 21:41, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

What Wilcox is coyly talking about is that he heisted a lot of concepts from TOPS-10. Alpha Micro got sued for this by DEC. In particular from the TOPS-10 article: "TOPS-10 had a very robust application programming interface (API) that used a mechanism called a UUO or Unimplemented User Operation. UUOs implemented operating system calls in a way that made them look like machine instructions."

What does this mean for the Alpha Micro? AMOS SVCA B and C operating system calls (see WD-16) used standard PDP-11 addressing modes for their arguments. So you could open a file in any of these ways:

OPEN file

OPEN file(R2)

LEA R2, file; OPEN @R2

OPEN @(R5)+

RastaKins (talk) 22:06, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, you're right, the Dr. Dobbs article does make several references to the operating system having various DecSystem-10 (PDP-10) conventions. Bumm13 (talk) 21:48, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]