| Three Rivers Perq |
Articles about Perq |
Information AboutThree Rivers Perq |
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| personal computers | |
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TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS There are three official PERQ models that were released: the original PERQ (also known as the PERQ 1), the PERQ T-1 ( 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-11 s or other PERQs using the special 16-bit PERQlink interface. OPERATING SYSTEMS The default 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 (another Unix variant), 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 Machine s and workstations running microcoded UCSD Pascal or Modula-2 , except that the language of choice was Algol 68 . 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 . EXTERNAL LINKS
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