For those with the finest tastes in old computers!

Latest revision: Tuesday, October 17, 2006

This is a web page devoted to PERQ graphics workstations, the first definitive commercial graphics workstations. This web page, and associated file archive, were created for my fellow PERQ Fanatics and PERQ hackers, and others, who are mad enough to still share a common interest in these fine machines.

Latest PERQ News:



[PERQ mirrored spheres picture]

FAQs pertaining to PERQs

There are several PERQ FAQs which have been created, each addressing different PERQ related issues, which can be found here. These include: my original PERQ general FAQ in ASCII format, the HTML version of the General FAQ, the excellently hackish PERQ hardware FAQ by Dr. Tony Duell, and the very informative PERQ Programming FAQ by Iain A. F. Flemming:

Other PERQish Documents

Read my PERQ Historical and Technical Reference Guide, which is over two-hundred pages long and still incomplete. It was written over a decade ago and updated a little bit recently.

Read the PERQ CPU Technical Reference Manual by Dr. Tony Duell---a PERQ hacker extraordinare, a true genius, which is an excellent resource for understanding the details of how the PERQ CPU works. An updated version from Tony is planned.

More PERQish text file documents...

You may enyoy reading some interesting, useful and PERQ-related text files:

PERQ Sound Files

A very few speak (.spk) files for the PERQ: daisy1, phon1, sing1. Although the creators of the PERQs were innovators in comptuter-related audio, the PERQ workstations didn't benefit much from that and the audio quality of the PERQs, as far as I can tell, is quite disappointing. The PERQs also lack the necessary hardware for recording audio, and I understand that external hardware must to be hacked onto the PERQs in order to record audio on the PERQs.

PERQ Graphics Files

Some PERQ graphics files are archived here, such as:

PERQ TCP/IP Networking

Some TCP/IP software existed, but I've never found any complete working TCP/IP software for the PERQs. However, I did find some non-functional TCP/IP software for PERQs running the Accent OS on an old tape, which I hacked on a bit in some spare time. Although I didn't get it to to much, it may still be useful to someone.

PERQ LispKit

LispKit.tar.gz for the PERQs. I forget what this is... unzip it, untar it, tranfer the files to your PERQ, try it and find out; you may like it!

PERQdisk RT-11 Interchange Software

PERQdisk V1.0 and V2.0, written by Dr. Tony Duell. This software allows one to read and write PERQ "interchange" formate (RT-11) floppies on a PC.

Centronics and I2C drivers for the PERQ

Yet more useful software for the PERQs from Dr. Tony Duell! :-) Note: this software is for the POS operating system.

Create POS G.6 Boot and Run Floppies

The following scripts are something I wrote for creating POS boot and run floppies for the PERQs:

The Alt.sys.perq Archive

The archive of the Alt.sys.perq newsgroup from the very beginning. Note that this archive is not 100-percent complete. For about a few weeks, UUNET had stopped carrying the a.s.p newsgroup, but I was able to save some of the messages from another system (they're in the file named asp.digex, or something like that). Also, there had been another UUCP interruption and not all of the messages appeared to be arriving at mystica, but I did attempt archiving them on another system; those are in files named something like asp.umbc. So, aside from a very few messages, almost everything from the early days of Alt.sys.perq should be archived (hopefully!).

Most of the a.s.p articles are in groups of 100 messages; they really should be sorted through, so as to note what the dates of the first and last messages in them are.

PERQ Games

A few PERQ games (for POS, IIRC):

Kermit for the PERQs

PERQ kermit sources. I don't recall which of the following is what; they may or may not be quite similar: perqkermits.tar.gz and pqk.tar.gz.

Assorted PERQ Utilities

Other PERQish Web Sites

There are also some other PERQ-related web pages on the 'net that you'll most likely wish to visit:


Copyright (C) 1996, 2006 R. D. Davis, All Rights Reserved