PERQ Workstations (original) (raw)

All About PERQ Workstations!

A PERQ 1
One particular type of computer I'm interested in is the PERQ series of machines. These are graphics workstations, which were sold in the UK by ICL. The PERQ 1 was an early commercial graphics workstation. They are truly beautiful pieces of design...
If you decide that you are interested in owning one of these fine machines, the good news is that they are relatively common in the UK, because they were actively promoted for academic work in universities. Posting to the newsgroup alt.sys.perq has been known to yield results...

You probably also want to take a look at R.D.Davis'PERQ page - the mirrored spheres image is impressive.

There are a number of FAQs on PERQ computers. These tend to concentrate on the PERQ-1 and 2, but they make interesting reading nonetheless:

You might want to learn the arcane ritualrequired to park the heads on the awe-inspiring 14" Shugart hard disk fitted to the PERQ 1...

The PERQ is soft-microcodable, so anybody can redefine or extend its instruction set if they wish. It supported bytecode interpretation in hardware long before Sun thought of Java... ARD12 (Tony Duell) wrote a three part "Introduction to Microcoding" which makes very interesting reading: here are partsone, two andthree. You can also have a look at a piece of microcode I wrote, to implement a ROT13 opcode...

I have both a PERQ 1 and a PERQ 3. Both are described on mycollection page. I've actually (15 years on!) updated the photographs I've taken of the PERQ 1, so they're much better quality.

The image at the top of this page is of a PERQ 1, from an advert in the July 1981 issue of Datamation; you can look at the advert in a big 1MB version, a medium 328K version or a smaller 90K version. The text is readable in all versions; you should note that it has at least one technical error, though [the writable control store is decidedly not optional...]

This page written by Peter Maydell (pmaydell@chiark.greenend.org.uk).