PERQ
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PERQ, often referred to as the Three Rivers PERQ, was an influential computer workstation first released in 1979. The workstation was conceived by five former Carnegie Mellon University employees that formed the startup Three Rivers Computer Corporation (3RCC) in 1974. One of the founders, Brian Rosen, had worked at Xerox PARC on the Dolphin workstation. The system was a direct descendant of the original workstation, the Xerox Alto and was the first commercially available personal workstation, being launched at the 1979 SIGGRAPH conference.
As a result of interest from the UK Science and Engineering Research Council, 3RCC entered into a deal with the British computer company ICL, for European distribution, and later co-development and manufacturing. The PERQ was used in a number of academic research projects in the UK during the 1980s.
The origin of the name "PERQ" is from the word perquisite. 3RCC, by then renamed PERQ System Corporation, went out of business in 1986, largely due to competition from upstart workstation manufacturers such as Sun Microsystems, Apollo Computer and Silicon Graphics.
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[edit] Technical specifications
There are three official PERQ models that were released: the original PERQ (also known as the PERQ 1)Brochure, the PERQ T-1 (1981), and the PERQ T-2 (1982). All PERQ workstations used discrete logic microcoded CPUs instead of microprocessors. The later PERQ models looked more like workstations such as the Xerox Star and had a more standard square-shaped monitor than the original page-shaped monitor (more height than width). The PERQ 1 configuration was 256K of 16-bit memory, 12 or 24 MB of hard disk storage, and an instruction speed of 1 MIPS. The original PERQ had 2 expansion slots and two communications ports: one IEEE-488 connection and one RS-232 serial port. PERQ 1s had the ability to use Ethernet with a special expansion card in its OIO slot; later PERQs had up to two built-in Ethernet ports. All PERQ workstations had options for both a laser printer and a dot-matrix printer and could also be interfaced to DEC PDP-11s or other PERQs using the special 16-bit PERQlink interface.
[edit] Operating systems
The initial operating system for PERQ workstations was POS (PERQ Operating System). Other operating systems available for the PERQ included MPOS (POS with multitasking), Accent (sometimes with QNIX, a Unix add-on), PNX (a Unix port developed by ICL at Dalkeith Palace, Scotland), and FLEX. Accent was a multitasking operating system developed at Carnegie Mellon University that predated the Mach kernel which many later operating systems would use. FLEX was somewhat similar to other workstation systems such as Lisp machines and workstations running microcoded UCSD Pascal or Modula-2, except that the language of choice was Algol 68.
[edit] Miscellaneous PERQ software and uses
Perq was a microcoded machine, and its default instruction set was a variant of p-code which was optimized for Pascal. The operating system and utilities were all written in Pascal. In fact it was generally more efficient to use Pascal than to attempt to create "assembler" programs directly with P-Code.
The PERQ was a popular early graphical workstation; therefore, it helped spawn many early third-party applications that took advantage of the graphical user interface and bitmapped graphics. Intran (around 1982) produced a pioneering graphical program suite called MetaForm, which consisted of the separate Graphics Builder, Font Builder, Form Builder, and File Manager programs. The PERQ also served as a dedicated platform for several pioneering hypertext programs, such as ZOG and Guide.
PERQ schematics were drawn using DP (drawing package), a CAD system written by Dario Giuse, which ran on the PERQ.
[edit] PERQ 3
The PERQ 3 workstation was developed jointly by ICL and 3RCC as a replacement for the PERQ 2. The PERQ 3 had an all-new hardware architecture based around a 12.5 MHz Motorola MC68020 processor and MC68881 floating-point unit, and was housed in a desktop "mini-tower"-style enclosure. Prototype units were produced in 1985, but the project was cancelled before full production commenced, following the collapse of 3RCC.
