Looking for a TI technical report on Explorer virtual memory

Michael Engel engel at multicores.org
Tue Sep 15 07:53:57 CDT 2020


Hi,

first, a big "thank you" to all of you who support me with my attempt to 
get our Explorers and Xerox Stars to run again. I´ll head down to the 
basement in the afternoon to see if I can build a system that is able to 
image the Explorer not-quite-SCSI disks (according to the documentation, 
these have in fact 256 byte sectors).

Btw., this Raspberry Pi SCSI device emulator supposedly also supports 
emulating SASI drives:
https://hackaday.com/2017/05/01/the-raspberry-pi-becomes-a-scsi-device/

The original Japanese web page linked in the article is no longer 
online, but there are several versions of the code (and a translated 
webpage in English) mirrored on github. This might be useful to build a 
working SCSI device emulation for the Explorer.

So I have another favor related to TI Explorers to ask...

One of the reasons (apart from the planned exhibition) I am interested 
in Lisp and Smalltalk machines is that I´m collecting information on 
systems using persistent memory, which could also help my students who 
work on persistent memory research topics to obtain a better insight 
into the topic and its history.

There was a research prototype of a persistent virtual memory system for 
the TI Explorer by Satish M. Tatte (TI Artificial Intelligence Labs) 
metioned in these papers:

Satish M. Thatte. 1986. Persistent memory: a storage architecture for 
object-oriented database systems. In Proceedings on the 1986 
international workshop on Object-oriented database systems (OODS '86). 
IEEE Computer Society Press, Washington, DC, USA, 148–159.
(https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.5555/318826.318848)

and

Thatte S.M. (1991) Persistent Memory: A Storage System for 
Object-Oriented Databases. In: Dittrich K.R., Dayal U., Buchmann A.P. 
(eds) On Object-Oriented Database Systems. Topics in Information 
Systems. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. 
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-84374-7_16

The second paper cites a more detailed TI Tech Report which I have been 
unable to find:

Thatte, S.M.: "Persistent Memory for Symbolic Computers", Technical 
Report TR-08-85-21, Central Research Laboratories, Texas Instruments 
Incorporated, Dallas, TX, July 1985.

Does one of you maybe have a copy of this?

Best wishes,
     Michael



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