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The Dragon Computer System

An Early Overview

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Microarchitecture of VLSI Computers

Part of the book series: NATO ASI Series ((NSSE,volume 96))

Abstract

Dragon is a new computer system being designed at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. In many ways Dragon is the newest descendant in the line of research personal computers that began in 1973 with the Alto and ends today in the Dorado. Like those machines, Dragon will be a personal computer. To us, this means a high-performance display controller and a virtual memory with only rudimentary protection hardware. Dragon and Dorado both execute programs compiled from the Cedar language. (Cedar is an extension of the Xerox Mesa language, which is a derivative of Pascal.) We plan to build modest numbers of Dragons for ourselves to allow us to explore useful ways of exploiting such performance in a personal setting before such machines are economical in widespread use.

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© 1985 Xerox Corporation

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McCreight, E.M. (1985). The Dragon Computer System. In: Antognetti, P., Anceau, F., Vuillemin, J. (eds) Microarchitecture of VLSI Computers. NATO ASI Series, vol 96. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-5143-3_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-5143-3_3

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-94-010-8775-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-009-5143-3

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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