Rational R1000-400 and RTEMS?

[Per Dalgas Jakobsen]

On 11/6/19 11:41 PM, Joel Sherrill wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 6, 2019 at 3:23 PM Chris Johns <chrisj at rtems.org
> <mailto:chrisj at rtems.org>> wrote:
>
>     On 7/11/19 1:23 am, Per Dalgas Jakobsen wrote:
>     > Last week we succeeded starting up an R1000-400 and have a
>     working environment
>     > on a FACIT A-4600 monitor.
>
>     Oh my that is amazing. I have not seen one of those since the
>     early '90s. I
>     worked on the hardware side of a project written in Ada developed
>     on one of
>     those boxes. The FACIT terminals are nice, I ended up with one for
>     many years
>     after the Ada box was switched off.
>
>
> Impressive to get that running. I did some Internet sleuthing and
> that's not easy. :)

Thanks, we wouldn't have succeeded without help from several people.

The FACIT terminal is certainly nice.
I'd actually forgot how responsive and usable 9600 baud terminal can be.
A little odd to think about when IT-people of today whine over less than
1Gbit/s connections - To be fair, ASCII terminals do not present images
or videos very well, but on the other hand, how many people actually
require (or even benefits) from having a graphical environment ;)


>     > The R1000-400 is a machine intended for team development and
>     maintenance of
>     > large Ada systems:
>     > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_R1000
>     > https://datamuseum.dk/wiki/Rational/R1000s400
>     >
>     > A log of our efforts to get it running, with some picture can be
>     found here:
>     > https://datamuseum.dk/wiki/Rational/R1000s400/Logbook
>     >
>     > If there is anyone here that may have some history, stories or
>     knowledge related
>     > to the R1000-400, we would be very interested to hear about it.
>     Especially if it
>     > involves RTEMS of course :)
>
>     I did not use the Rational box but I remember somethings. The
>     run-time parts I
>     saw had a tick and basic tasking and I think an interrupt pragma
>     but I seem to
>     remember the software had a lot of sleeps and polls.
>
>
> That's about all that's required for an Ada run-time. One of the
> original goals of
> the Army sponsorship of the RTEMS Project was to be a cross-compiler
> Ada run-time.
> We did implement it for Tartan and Telesoft but not Rational (or any
> other vendor). 
> It pointed out that the Ada products suffered from some of the same
> things RTOS
> products do that RTEMS was supposed to address. The run-time
> interfaces were
> highly proprietary, subject to change, required an expensive (USD100K
> in 1991) 
> source access license fee which needed to be paid for each version,
> and were 
> not really designed to be delivered as source code.

Apparently the R1000-400 came with a price tag of almost USD1M at that
time - No wonder that Ada did not get the deserved traction at that time...

Thanks for sharing your stories :-)

Best regards
Per

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