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Celebrating ARM's 25th Anniversary With the Visual ARM1 (visual6502.org)

Posted by timothy on from the solder-with-silver dept.

In a slow-burn series of posts going back to 2010, the Visual6502.org has presented diagrams and commentary on "ancient microchips," mosly based on painstaking microphotography after just-as-painstaking depackaging and cleaning of the actual chips.Today, reader trebonian writes an excerpt from their latest entry, in honor of the 25th anniversary of ARM Ltd., UK, which is somewhat different: To celebrate and honor their amazing work, we present the Visual ARM1, created in collaboration with some of ARM's founding engineers.

Designed by Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber before there was an ARM Ltd., the Acorn RISC Machine was the first of a line of processors that power our cell phones and tablets today. Unlike our projects based on microscope images, the Visual ARM was created from a resurrected .cif chip layout file, used under our license agreement with ARM. We also photographed one of the few ARM1 chips at very high resolution, and our photograph is featured at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge.

Credit goes to ARM founding engineers John Biggs for inspiring the project, discovering the tape, and recovering a usable .cif file, Lee Smith for spotting the variable record format used to encode the file (an artifact of the VMS on Acorn's VAX that at first appeared to be widespread corruption of the file), to Cambridge University Computing Services for reading the Exabyte tape, and to ARM founder Dave Howard for help unraveling the VLSI CIF dialect. Our chip simulation and visualization was developed by Barry Silverman, Brian Silverman, Ed Spittles, and Greg James.

13 of 37 comments (clear)

  1. Um... by davmoo · · Score: 2

    Shouldn't there be a link in there somewhere?

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    I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
    1. Re:Um... by davmoo · · Score: 2

      Oops, there it is...in the title. When did we start doing that?

      --
      I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
    2. Re: Um... by techcodie · · Score: 2

      that's okay. with an ad blocker, the title shows nothing but this page. not much content yet though.

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      last minute desperate solutions to impossible problems created by other fucking people.
    3. Re: Um... by Nermal6693 · · Score: 2

      It's actually in green-on-green text to the right of the title (but still within the title bar).

    4. Re:Um... by Trevelyan · · Score: 3, Informative

      http://blog.visual6502.org/2015/11/the-visual-arm1.html

      Who RTFA anyway? A badly edited summary should be enough for anyone (tm).

  2. What scares me here by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 4, Insightful

    is that reading and exploiting data that's a mere 25 years old requires almost archeological-like recovery and reconstruction techniques. Compare that to a thousand year old book that's usually pretty much readily readable today.

    I think modern society is on a scary path towards massive amnesia in the not-so-long term...

    --
    "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
    1. Re:What scares me here by Lunix+Nutcase · · Score: 2

      Except the ones written in dead dialects that people spend years, decades or centuries decoding. And that's after the extraordinary luck fhat the book sven survived very long in the first place.

    2. Re:What scares me here by bondsbw · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I'm not so sure this is going to be as big of a problem going forward. The abundance of formats and specialized hardware were due largely to the lack of standardization. And just getting the system to have acceptable performance often required tweaking not machine code, but the hardware itself.

      Today we solve many more problems using general purpose hardware and software written in well-documented languages, and open-source is making that documentation live much longer than it might otherwise.

      Plus the Internet in general has transformed the idea of archiving.

      --
      All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
  3. Variable record format? by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 2

    Is that referring to data stored on a magnetic tape using varying record lengths? This used to be pretty common. The first record would be a text file telling you how the rest of the tape was formatted (although sometimes that descriptive "record" was a separate piece of paper attached to the spool).

    Ah, those were the days, having to load reel-to-reel tapes by hand, hard drives the size of washing machines...

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    #DeleteChrome
    1. Re:Variable record format? by Tapewolf · · Score: 2

      Interesting that they struggled to find an Exabyte drive - those used to be the way you'd send audio to a CD pressing plant. I'd have thought there should be a bunch of them knocking around...

    2. Re:Variable record format? by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      How the [beep] would you make a text file in the beginning if you at this moment don't fully know what would be the rest?

      What you apparently don't know is that the unstructured file is basically a Unix feature. Before that, computers overwhelmingly had structured data. You knew precisely what kind of data would be in a file because you defined the file structure when you created it. Consequently, a description of the data format already existed. Ever created an application on a mainframe? Guess not.

      --
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  4. Idiotic stylesheet? Brain dead rendering? by aglider · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The fact is that on mobile phones and tablets, Firefox is not displaying any "green on green" link.
    The other fact is that a link, which comes at a very competitive price nowadays, could have been added within the article.
    Well, the string spelling the link IS inside the article, only it's not marked up as a link.
    Ah, all those insensitive TXT clods!

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    Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
  5. Are you missing the fun stuff? by dZap · · Score: 2

    I think the 3Hz visual simulation of the cpu you get to by clicking the image in the article is rather fun. Great way to understand clock cycles and what computing involves.