Note about the PERQ’s history from Brian Rosen, as it appeared in the PERQ-Fanatics mailing list on July 30, 1993:
I might be able to shed a little light on chronology, but I only really remember the order of things rather than the actual dates:
It started at CMU, where there was a very active engineering labo-ratory headed by Bill Broadly that built hardware for CS research.
Several somewhat interesting projects came out of that, including the first 16-bit A-D and D-A systems for speech and music research, a writable control store for a PDP-11 model 40, and a cute vector (calligraphic) display that did 50,000 vectors at a 60Hz refresh rate.
Three Rivers Computer Corporation was started by Broadly, Stan Kriz, Jim Teter, Paul Newbury and myself, with a little help and en-couragement from Raj Reddy. Its first products were versions of the above projects. We all worked full time for CMU and moonlighted at 3RCC.
In 1976, I left to go to work at Xerox, at the Palo Alto Research Center, where I worked on a successor to the Alto (the first
worksta-13
14 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY tion, against which all others sprang) called the Dolphin. When the Dolphin was completed, I returned to 3RCC and started work on the Perq. That was 1978. At that time, CMU was starting a project to change the way it provided computing to the CS people from timeshared mainframes to “personal” computers or workstations.
They put out a request for proposals, to which 3RCC responded.
The first showing of the Perq was as Siggraph, 1980, and the first machine was delivered to CMU in late 80 or early 81. It had 256K of memory, 27MB disk (14”), 4K of writable control store, an 8”
floppy disk, and a 768 x 1024 monochrome raster display. At the time, Sun and Apollo were dreams. The Perq had a lot in common with the Alto, but was significantly different in many ways.
One of the early customers for Perq was Bob Hopgood, at Ruther-ford Appleton Labs in the U.K. His enthusiasm for the Perq caused the Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC) to try to adopt it as a computing platform for SERC sponsored research.
However, SERC could not go around pushing a U.S. system. So, it influenced ICL to enter into a collaborative effort with 3RCC to make PERQs in the U.K. Eventually, ICL provided some funding for 3RCC and engaged in some co-operative R+D efforts.
3RCC, which changed its name to PERQ Systems in around 1983, never had stable financing, made several management mistakes, never had effective marketing, waited too long to switch to micro-processors, and foolishly followed CMU’s efforts on operating system development (Accent, precursor to Mach). I was Vice President of Engineering through much of the above, so I’ll take most of the blame, if you wish.
Perq went belly up in 1985 when its investors refused to supply any further funding.
A note about PERQ history from Robert Rae, of July 30, 1994, from the PERQ-Fanatics mailing list:
I was involved at the beginning of the UK Perq saga in a rather weird way. We (Bill Clocksin and myself, as I remember, in the AI department at Edinburgh) were contacted around December 1979 by Bob Hopgood of the Rutherford Appleton Lab and Roger Vinni-combe of ICL (through Tommy Thomas of the ERCC), with strict instructions not to tell anyone about anything we knew about the
2.1. PERQ HISTORY AS TOLD BY THOSE WHO WERE THERE 15 Perq. As neither of us had heard of it before, this was not too difficult! They then told us all about it. We never did find out why they thought we were already involved ...
Remember that, at that time, we lived in a relatively under-priviliged computing world. The Department’s own computing resource was one PDP-11/60 (relatively recent: it had been one 11/10 before that!), and research work had the use of a locally managed PDP-10 which served a national SERC AI community. VAXen were new and wonderful (was the 750 just becoming available?) and a VT100 on everyone’s desk was a pipe dream. Xerox Altos, MIT Lisp Machines and Nu bus plans, and the CMU SPICE project made us very jealous.
So the prospect of a commercially available VAX style architecture with incredible graphics capabilities at an affordable price was very attractive.
The result was that Rob Witty (then at RAL) and I packed our passports and visited Three Rivers in Pittsburgh on (it says in the report in my hot little hand) the 14th and 15th of January 1980 to have a look at the Perq and meet some of the people involved:
mainly Brian Rosen, Stan Kriz, Bob Spuntak and Miles Barel. I think we also spoke that time to Robert Sproull at CMU. It was really exciting to be involved with such a new technology. At that time, they had assembled only five machines, and I don’t remember any of them actually being capable of working (but real soon now)!.
Our summary (I hope confidentiality isn’t a big issue now) included the statement which I would continue to stand by: “The PERQ software will be little and late”.
We actually wanted a Unix box and the Unix port1 was not done until a lot later by ICL, at Dalkeith just outside Edinburgh. Unfor-tunately there seemed to be collective brain failure there and they targeted the PDP11 rather than the VAX as their competition, so they went for good performance for small processes. They also went for separate input and output windows (I think that was Nick Felisi-ack’s decision: I name the guilty party). It was also handicapped, as far as we were concerned at least, by a UK religious intention to use token ring rather then ethernet technology, so we couldn’t use any existing US networking software and communications were not good. So it never did fullfill its original promise, but it was an
1PNX
16 CHAPTER 2. HISTORY excellent graphics platform and, for a short time, it was the nearest we had to the future.
We did eventually use it most (a 3RCC mk2 running Accent) as a benchmark for Common Lisp.
It was all a very long time ago and, I fear, a lot hasn’t stuck in my memory.
Robert Rae