HP/DEC/Compaq

SAQ wrote: HP did go through a period where they thought they'd challenge SGI for graphics, but the software end of it just wasn't there.

neither was the hardware

Well, the FireGL cards weren't bad for the day. When I was a consultant slut, I maintained a C3750 the biology department had an NSF grant for doing protein visualization on.

'consultant slut' is a new one on me. I used to use 'intellectual prostitute' or EKS (Evil-Kontractor-Scum). Happy days...

urbancamo wrote: 'consultant slut' is a new one on me. I used to use 'intellectual prostitute' or EKS (Evil-Kontractor-Scum). Happy days...

Remember: if you're not part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem.

SAQ wrote: HP did go through a period where they thought they'd challenge SGI for graphics, but the software end of it just wasn't there.

They did and they won, on the desktop at least, just not with HP-sUX.

The whole HP Visualize series was designed for the toughest work in the technical computing, and with rock-solid 64bit HP-UX v11 operating system it rises to the extreme challenges of electronic design, including system-on-a-chip simulation and IC verification. Good. Designed for the toughest work. On which software ? Proprietary ? OpenSource ? Is it avaiable for Linux-HPPA2 ? No gnat available for HPPA2, so no ghdl, so no system-on-a-chip simulation and IC verification. So you need to pay for a proprietary software for HP-UX v11. Which is RIP, nowadays.

I have rider, my C8k up and running using PKGSRC. It is not the hottest looking example and it's missing the pedestal . But it runs reliably. I have it pretty much maxed out.

I actually recently built CDE on FreeBSD and want to start making it look more IRIXy, especially since the big Linux DEs now mandate logind and dbus. Fuck Lennart and Merry Christmas.

Don't you know someone with a gnat-bootstrap for freeBSD, Linux, opensource whatever? It's a pity we have powerful and stable machines, without gnat. And i am lost without ghdl (whose primary dependency is gnat) because I can't simulate anything ='(

On FreeBSD you use port lang/gcc-aux for Ada programming - the API for gnat is broken.

to compile ghdl ? will it work? who knows
it would be fab.

p.s.
do you have PA-RISC or Itanium cpus on your C8K?
I don't see FreeBSD in the openpa page
Supported OS. It says { HP-UX, Linux }

This was done by gEDA on C8K with linux/HPPA

This is gorgeous, man!

commodorejohn wrote: It's one thing to drop support as far as updates go, but actually removing access to older builds for older systems is just obscene, especially since it's blocked from being mirrored on archive.org.

true, apparently stupid moves do happen which is why it's always a good idea not to rely on others when it comes to important things i.e. save the stuff that's important to you on your own

That happened to AIXPDSLIB. I've got some of it but not all of it, and almost none of the AIX 5 stuff. :/

Shiunbird wrote: This is gorgeous, man!

Thanks. Creating packages on gEDA is simpler than on KiCAD, but the creating a decent preview involves a lot of interactions between the CAM processor (with a photoplotter and a drill machine in mind, gerber files) and imageMagic (gimp), plus a lot of manual operations passing data through a lot of python-scripts. E.g. holes are placed using the drilling-machine file, applying a dark circle filled with solid black, while all the gilding along the solder pad points is done by a gimp's filter which takes coordinates from one of the gerber files.

Next time I will just use "gerber view", even it the quality of the preview is not so good.

Creating a PCB is not an easy task and there are many ways for a fab house to mess it up. The above PCB is dual layers, without vias, it might be done at home but I am going to outsource the manufacture of all my PCBs, which is good since it saves your time, but you also need manufacturer's constraints. In this case the PCB is simple enough; I mean trace width and spacing are not critical so the might work without problems, but strictly speaking, the final result depends on the DFM (design for manufacture) rules and constraints.

I still have to find a way to include DFM within gEDA designs, so the C8K will be the perfect PCB-designer machine

VDU, using an fpga + SRAM

Re-done on C8K by a friend. It was a complex process, he said, the original design was done on a Windows/PC with DipTrace, then exported, and rendered on C8K. It's too complex and too time consuming. It's even more complex than the 3D-CAM process used by EagleCAD

Conclusion:
I assume the picture posted in the previous post (which was a planar 2D) is the best I can do on HPPA/linux with gEDA and ImageMagic