"new" classics (was Re: Pre-history of Digital Research)

From: Chuck McManis <cmcmanis_at_mcmanis.com>
Date: Sat Mar 20 17:18:19 1999

About every three weeks or so I kick around this idea of building a "new"
classic computer. Lately my thoughts have been to build something with a
loadable control store so that I could microprogram different instructions
as I saw fit or was necessary. Of course the machine would have a front
panel with switches and LEDs to indicate state.

I then come to the question of "add in" boards. Ideally one would like to
establish some sort of bus and make available a wide variety of add in
boards that could be used to customize the system.

Then there is cost, one would like to keep the cost at a minimum as well.

So in the connector area I've been considering something "VME" like which
would consist of two 50 pin right angle molex connectors and the
"mainboard" would consist of 50 pin AMP sockets. These are pretty cheap
because of SCSI and they should provide enough pins. (one could imagine
three connectors for a total of 150 pins but that seems like overkill.)

Unfortunately I think this is way off topic for this group.
--Chuck
Received on Sat Mar 20 1999 - 17:18:19 GMT