Tarl Neustaedter Consulting

Computer engineering, mostly software, mostly operating systems and networks, specializing in high-performance device drivers. Currently employed by Sun Microsystems, Inc., working on Infiniband booting software.

My original plan in setting up this site was to go into the free-lance consulting business, but I've ended up fully and happily employed instead. At some point in the future, I may move into the consulting business at which time the following may become relevant again. In the meantime, the below summary is just for practice - I don't really have time to sell my services. But I do offer free advice, worth at least double what I charge for it (and money back if you aren't satisfied!).

Pre-Professional background.
• Started in Mexico City with IBM 360s and System/3s, programming in RPG and COBOL. First timesharing work was on an IRIS operating system running on a DCC-116 (remember Digital Computer Controls? They built DG novas without bothering to pay Data General any royalties. Then DG got annoyed and swallowed them in a court case).

  While at college at University of Arizona played with NOS/BE on a CDC Cyber-175 and TOPS-10 on a DEC KL-10. Off-campus played with RDOS on MicroNOVAs, and in a brief interlude best forgotten, consulting on TRS-80s.

  Professional background

• After college, worked for five years at Digital Equipment (swallowed by Compaq, engulfed by HP) on the TOPS-10 and -20 operating systems and DECnet phase III and IV. Worked on virtual memory, network management, DECnet routing, command line scanning and login subsystem.

• Worked four years were at Prime Computer (went private and pretty much dissapeared), working on the LHC-300 Ethernet controller and various protocols which ran on top of it (primenet, LLC type 2, terminal servers, TCP/IP). Earned U.S. patent #4956771 for an unpatentable host-to-controller IPC protocol. Internet and usenet experience starts around this timeframe (1985), although had occasionally used the ArpaNet from DEC prior to that.

• Worked at Stratus Computer for six years on projects ranging through proprietary operating system (VOS) work, async adapter firmware, FDDI controllers, proprietary host-to-host RPC protocols, and the SS7 protocol stack on FTX (a variant of unix). The company I worked for was swallowed by Ascend, and re-swallowed by Lucent, and the web page above points to a fragment regurgitated later on.

• Spent a little less than a year at Boston Technology, a builder of gigantic voice-mail machines for the telephone industry. BT has since been swallowed by Comverse. If you buy Call Answering from one of the telephone companies, odds are reasonably good that you are talking to the kind of system I worked on. I learned a lot about ISDN, SMDI, telephone trunking and the telephony industry - enough to stay away.

• Currently working on OpenBoot proms for future platforms and devices at Sun Microsystems, Inc. I was hired to write Unix drivers, and wrote several ethernet drivers, designed async (RS232) comms drivers and circuitry, and did a bunch of work on Fibre Channel disk drivers before moving onto PROM (OpenBoot, IEEE 1275) work. In the bootprom, while mostly doing I/O drivers (scsi, raid, fibrechannel, ethernets, IEEE 1394/firewire, USB and currently Infiniband), I've also ended up being a platform engineer and sticking my oar in just about every other part of this prom. Most of the work is in FORTH, some in SPARC assembler but it doesn't really matter since I don't do real work any more, I just write specifications and argue in meetings.

Assemblers I've programmed in:

• Sun Sparc V7, V8 and V9.
• HP P/A Risc
• Intel i960 (Stratus FDDI controller. Nifty cpu architecture.)
• Intel i860 (Stratus mainframe cpu. Awful cpu architecture.)
• Motorola 68000, 68010, 68020 and 68030 (didn't get to 68040).
• Intel 80186, 80286 and Pentium (skipped two generations).
• Prime 50-series in V, R, and I modes.
• DEC Macro assemblers; PDP-10, PDP-11, Vax, PDP-8.
• CDC Compass (Cyber-175 main processor and PPUs).
• Data General Nova-3 and microNova.

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