RE: External: Re: [EXTERNAL] History of EPICS

[Russ Berg via Tech-talk <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov>]

No worries Richard! Looking at my notes from back then it appears that in regards to “RTEMS on the PC” I also struggled with the network,  namely the 3c509 network card (that name blew a bit of dust of some old neurons!).

 

Yes I had heard that Greg had unfortunately passed not long ago, Mark was the machine director for a number of years but last year moved on to be a tenured prof here at the Uni, I did manage to convert him to a hockey fan before he left though 😊.

 

Cheers,

-Russ

 

From: Richard Farnsworth <RIFarnsworth at yahoo.com>
Sent: February 27, 2025 2:16 AM
To: Russ Berg <Russ.Berg at lightsource.ca>
Cc: Johnson, Andrew N. <anj at anl.gov>; Nonn, Patrick <patrick.nonn at desy.de>; tech-talk at aps.anl.gov
Subject: Re: External: Re: [EXTERNAL] History of EPICS

 

Happy to be beaten Russ. I visited the CLS before I started the architecture of the AS, so I must have taken confidence in your achievements. My memory can be faulty. I do recall looking at RTEMs and thinking it wasn’t ready for us. I recall Til Strauman at SLAC working on the IP stack for RTEMs and thinking it was too early for my tiny team. I will claim the PC hardware though. No VME on our IOCs.

 

Sadly, Greg LeBlanc passed on a little while ago. But Mark is up at the CLS as machine director or something.

 

Richard 

On Feb 27, 2025, at 04:27, Russ Berg <Russ.Berg at lightsource.ca> wrote:



Hi all,

Sorry Richard when I saw your claim I knew we had you beat 😊, I started at the Canadian Light Source in August 2001 and one of the first things I worked on was the SIS1100/3100 PCI-VME fibre link driver which became the basis of all of our Linux VME EPICS access for the machine and beamlines. I struggled for about 2 months trying to get an RTEMS setup together to port the 1100 driver but even with Erik Norum’s help (I think he had just left to SLAC? when I started) I was not able to get it running properly so a couple of months later (in January of 2002) we switched to using Redhat Linux for the VME driver and all EPICS development with the intention of dealing with a real time solution for VME down the road when the need arose.

 

So I do know that by Jan 2002 all VME access was via SIS1100/3100 from a PC and all IOC’s were running Redhat.

 

As for first light, I believe the Australian Light Source was still under construction at the time because I remember several from Australia joined us for storage commissioning (Mark Boland, Greg Leblanc,..)  

we took first light 2003-12-09, 18:45h.

 

-Russ

 

From: Tech-talk <tech-talk-bounces at aps.anl.gov> On Behalf Of Johnson, Andrew N. via Tech-talk
Sent: February 26, 2025 10:05 AM
To: Richard Farnsworth <rifarnsworth at yahoo.com>
Cc: Nonn, Patrick <patrick.nonn at desy.de>; tech-talk <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov>
Subject: External: Re: [EXTERNAL] History of EPICS

 

On 2/26/25, 6:17 AM, Richard Farnsworth wrote:

So I'm claiming "first all-Linux" EPICS machine at first light.  While I'm claiming firsts, I'd also like to try to claim a last. Andrew Johnson might like to check for me this if at all possible, I think we were the last major facility to sign an EPICS license agreement, rather than the current EPICS open licence it is now.

I don’t have the data to confirm that anymore, unfortunately. The two lists of licensees on the APS website are both sorted and don’t contain dates, and I removed the code and database that handled license applications when we switched to the EPICS Open License.

 

- Andrew

-- 

Complexity comes for free, Simplicity you have to work for.