Shit happens. I wrote the firmware for a multi-link HDLC card which earned vast amounts of money for the company that commissioned it. I was quite aware of my responsibility and so was the hardware team. We stress tested the crap out of it before releasing to production and fortunately it never locked up when it was in actual use but we had some pretty wild and very rare (so hard to trigger and reproduce) bugs which delayed deployment considerably. But none of this gave me the kind of feeling that working on fuel estimation software for aircraft gave. That's when there are in the most literal sense lives on the line, and that's a completely different kind of pressure. You simply can not fuck up. It also really rammed home the value of code review and having a good specification so that you can ensure that within the envelope of input parameters your software does what it is supposed to do.
Multi-link HDLC. That brings me back to 1985 and the Intel 8274, Zilog Z8530 and the Western Digital WD2511 (that implemented the layer 2 protocol in silicon).
Yes, that was around that time. There were a couple of problems, the first batch of chips we got was very early in the development stage of the chip, pre-production issues and there were some bugs in the chips themselves which could cause lock-up under some circumstances. We found ways to work around those and then of course there were all of the niceties around dealing with a device that generates an extremely high rate of interrupts. So the code would either have to attempt to service all channels on any interrupt or be re-entrant. I don't remember which solution we picked but in the end the thing was, once we had the bugs worked out fairly bullet proof.
One funny bit about the development process was that initially I was going to be nice and implement every layer as its own stand-alone bit of software communicating via a defined set of primitives with the layers above and below. But that was slow as molasses so in the end all of that elegance got discarded for an absolutely unholy sandwich that did all of the layers in a single chunk of code. But with the experience from the 'slow' version that was actually doable, I would have never been able to write that as the first implementation. Classic illustration of 'first make it work, then make it fast'.
Cool. We had a small company in San Diego called Metacomp (long gone now) design a Z8530 add on module for their 80186 based Multibus board. It had two Z8530 chips on it and you could have two modules on the base board. So 8 channels total per slot.
Yes, 8 was just about the maximum, simply because that would approach the limits of how many interrupts you could process before you'd inevitably start losing them. Also, space and power delivery limitations, and connector space on the backside made doing more than that very impractical. Or you had to take more than one interrupt per board but that was 'not done'. I've always loved working on that division line between hardware and software, as close to the metal as possible. Funny, I'd all but forgotten about this project, now I'm wondering if I still have the software somewhere, just searched for a bit and can't locate it, so there is a good chance I wrote it on company hardware. I did find another project that I'd forgotten about, a CAD program for sails for sailboats that I wrote in the 80's for TD Sails in the Netherlands. That was a great project to work on and I met some awesome people doing it.
