[inforoots] Re: inforoots Digest, Vol 25, Issue 4 (GRiD history)

[Glenn Edens]

Thanks for the info Stan,

Larry Kelly joined GRiD in 1983, we made the decision to use GPIB in  
February of 1980 (GPIB is a slight variant of HP-IB since it was  
adopted by IEEE as the 488 specification but nearly identical to HP- 
IB).  Larry replaced me as vice president of development when i  
agreed to take on product marketing responsibilities.  By then we had  
started to move to serial and parallel ports as defined by the IBM  
PC, i don't remember when the last GPIB machine was produced by it  
was probably not much later than 1985.

You might also be thinking of Larry Gravell, who was in manufacturing  
at GRiD, he came from the calculator division at HP and he worked for  
Paul Hammil, who was vice president of manufacturing and also from HP.

All really great people!

NFS did not hit the scene until about 1986, it was defined in RFC1094  
in March 1989.

The HP 150 was an interesting machine, i remember when it was  
announced at NCC in late 1983, it also had a touch screen using  
infrared sensing.  As i remember it did beat out both GRiD and Apple  
shipping the Sony 3.5 inch floppy by a few months.

The DS/3000 system was also interesting, it was not really a  
networked file system since it did not support a LAN (that came later  
with NS/3000 circa 1988 as i remember).  DS/3000 supported modem  
connections or X.25 connections in a point-to-point mode and it was  
used alot for remote job entry (competing with devices like the IBM  
2760 or 3760 RJE terminals).  GRiDCentral was similar but to the  
programer it looked like a true remote file system, you could open,  
close, read, write, etc. to the server (again over a modem connection  
at the time).  We did not run any user jobs on GRiDCentral, it was  
more like today's web services model but, of course, all proprietary  
APIs..  Did DS/3000 have an API interface, i do not remember that? (i  
have the old manuals somewhere).  The HP 150 supported DS more like  
JCL; you could send jobs and data files to the 3000, get them run and  
then get the output back as a file for local printing.

Yes, thank you for correcting my sentence, it was confusing ;-)

Glenn


On Feb 17, 2006, at 12:07 PM, Stan Sieler wrote:

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> Re:
>
>>    1. RE: GRiD historical sgnificance
>
> A very interesting post, thanks!
>
>
> ...
>> 	We pioneered the concept of a "bus" for connecting peripherals,
>> we used GPIB (an IEEE standard developed by HP for test equipment)  
>> and
>> it allowed us to have hot swap peripherals including disk drives,
>> printers, scanners and other odd "military" equipment.  The
>> peripherals could be daisy chained just like USB and Firewire today.
>> We created quite a little cottage industry for GPIB peripherals for a
>> while.
>
> Hewlett-Packard's HP 300 (codenamed "Amigo"), from 1978, was the  
> first to use HP-IB (GPIB).
> It was HP's first HP-IB based computer.
>
> I wouldn't be surprised to find out that Larry Kelly, Vice  
> President of Manufacturing
> for a year at GRid (and formerly manager of the HP 150 lab) helped  
> out in that area
> (in introducing HP-IB / GPIB) ... perhaps drawing from his HP 150  
> experience
> and other HP experience.
>
> Although the HP 150 was introduced in 1983, it had been in the  
> making for *quite* awhile
> ... pre IBM PC, apparently.
> (Which explains how Larry could have had experience with it prior  
> to joing GRiD :)
>
> Although no one claimed "first 3.5" floppy, my recollection is that  
> the
> HP 150 was also a very early user of 3.5" floppy drives (including
> the one-sided, manual opening ones!).
> Several sites on the web claim that the HP 150 was the first to
> use the 3.5" floppy (a Sony OM-D30V).
>
>
>> It [GRiD] was also multitasking, which was very rare for the day,
>
> Sounds interesting.
>
> The HP 150 was developed with a multi-tasking operating system, Magic,
> but by the time it was finally released, the OS ran only two tasks:
> DOS and the terminal emulator :)
> (HP kept changing the design target for the HP 150, finally veering  
> close
> to IBM PC compatibility.)
>
>
>> 	And i have not been able to verify this with Vent Cerf but we
>> may also have been the first commercial email, file sharing and  
>> backup
>> service,
>
> ?
>
> That sounds interesting, I'd like to hear more!
>
> I don't recall when NFS was invented, but I recall using DS/3000
> ("Distributed Systems") circa 1979 at HP on an HP 3000 (MPE III  
> operating system).
> You could access files on other computers transparently
> (i.e., no program changes necessary...the equivalent of a DOS "SUBST"
> command could be issued prior to running a program.) ...
> it was definitely file sharing, and is still in use today at many  
> sites.
>
> I seem to recall that a version of DS was available for the HP 150.
>
>
>>>     * Jeff Hawkins formed many of the pen computing concepts that  
>>> went
>>>       into the Palm Pilot while at GRiD Systems
>> 	The Palm hardware was also done by some of the early GRiD team
>
> interesting!
>
> 	
>>>     * GRiD Systems was named by John Morgridge's (Cisco Systems)  
>>> wife
>> This one is dead wrong, John Morgridge did not join GRiD until
>> many years after it was founded, i was even long gone before John  
>> joined.
>> The name was created one afternoon by John, his ex-wife Gillian and
>
> (note: that should be "one afternoon by John Ellenby", to avoid
> a lot of confusion in the reader's mind :)
>
> Of course, "grid" was already there ... in Bill Moggridge's name :)
>
>
>>> Without GRiD much of what we take for granted today might not have
>>> evolved...
>>
>> 	I agree, humbly of course ;-)
>
> thanks for a great post!
>
> -- 
> Stan Sieler
> work:     www.allegro.com
> personal: www.sieler.com/wanted/index.html
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