> Tony Duell wrote:
> > IIRC, these units either had 2 Qume 8" floppy drives or one
> floppy drive
> > and a Micropolis 1203 hard disk with the Micropolis
> controller board on top.
>
> Mine is the 2 Qume floppy type. Never saw the one with the
> HD, but I remember
> reding it ran some type of Unix.
>
>
I had one of these a long time ago...it was called an 8560 Microprocessor
Development System.
The machine I had was in a similar case to the 8501, but inside was
a LSI 11 CPU board (original DEC, as I remember), and non Q-Bus backplane
that Tek devised that could accept Tek-made memory and peripheral boards.
The machine that I had had a Micropolis 8" harddisk (can't remember
the model), and a Qume DT-8 8" floppy drive. The Micropolis
drive sounded like a jet airplane when it spun up, along with the
really noisy fans in the cabinet itself. It was almost uncomfortably
loud.
I think the hard disk held a total of 35 Megabytes. The machine did run
Tektronix-munged version of V7 Unix called TNIX. The intent of the
machine was as a code development and emulation system for microprocessor
system and software development. Tek added a whole number of different
assemblers for many microprocessors...I remember there
were cross assemblers for 8080, 8085, Z-80, 8086, 6800, 6809, 68000,
6502, and others. I actually used some of the assemblers to build
bits for various microprocessor projects that I tinkered with at the
time (mostly 6809). The 8650 had two (as I remember) RS232 serial
ports on it. You could hook up terminals to both ports and
have multiple sessions running. There was an emulator subsystem
that could be connected into the system to allow emulation under
control of the TNIX environment. As I remember, the emulator was
another unit about the size of the 8650 that connected in through
a special interface, that provided an in-circuit emulation capability
for a number of different processors. These development systems were
used quite heavily within Tektronix for development of a number of
products, including Tek's first foray into digital oscilloscopes,
the Tektronix 11000-series machines.
I wish I still had that old beast...I ended up giving it away to
someone who seemed to want it more than I did at the time...I was
getting ready to move, and gave it away rather than moving it.
It was a fun machine to tinker with. I remember once that I tried
putting the source to 'rogue' on it and trying to compile it...never
got it to compile properly. I think the compiler was not the standard 'cc'
compiler as I recall, and it had some internal statically
allocated tables that would overflow when trying to compile 'big' stuff.
The machine wasn't really intended for Unix development work, so
I don't think much effort was made to make the Unix environment anything
more than an interface for the emulation and cross-assembler capabilities
of the system.
Another memory: When Tek scrapped the MDP group (the Microprocessor
Development Products) that made the 8650 and other development products)
a bunch of those old Micropolis 8" drives showed up at the Tek
country store. I got a few of 'em. Interesting drives. I managed
to go through the Tektronix engineering stock microfiche file and
find data on the interface to the Micropolis controller that piggybacked
on top of the drive electronics. A simple parallel interface, similar
to SCSI, but quite a time before SCSI existed. At the time, Tek
these wonderful little systems called "Board Buckets". Board Bucket
systems were designed internally by a group that was part of MDP.
They were a small aluminum chassis with a backplane (designed by
Tek), an external power supply box, and a whole slew of different
boards that could be plugged in. I recall that the original board
bucket systems were used as part of the development of the Tek 4051
computer. There were CPU boards for the Motorola 6800, 6809, and
I believe 8085, Z-80, and perhaps even 68000. There were static
and dynamic RAM boards, PROM boards, an EPROM programmer board, a
300-baud modem board, a video interface (using, I think, the
TI chip used for the video section in the TI 99/4), a floppy disk
controller, an 8-port serial board, and more. Anyway, I had a number
of board bucket systems that I built up from parts as machines to
play with.
Anyway, I ended up building an interface for the old Micropolis
drive that would plug into the Board Bucket, and ended up writing a
device driver for OS-9 that would allow it to talk to the Micropolis
drive! I had a 6809-based board bucket that had two 5 1/4" single
sided, double-density floppy drives, this 35 Megabyte Micropolis
hard disk, an 8-port I/O board, 64K of RAM, and a 1 Megabyte
RAM disk that I also hacked together. It was a very amazing system
for the time.
I still have a lot of the board bucket stuff...but alas, I think
that I threw away the hard disk drives as part of cleaning up
before yet another move, and all of the OS-9 stuff is long since
lost. OS-9 was a really cool OS from my recollection..I had a great
deal of fun tinkering with it...that is, until I ended up building
a Tektronix 6130...Tek's National 32016-based Unix (UTek) system
from parts...then I had a *real* computer running a real variant
of the only *real* Unix (4.2 BSD). The machine had a whopping
Megabyte of RAM, two serial ports, and a Micropolis 1302 20MB ST-506
drive, and a 5 1/4" half-height floppy drive. As soon as my 6130
was up and running, my interest in all the old OS-9 stuff pretty much
went by the wayside.
Well...I guess I've done two things here...one...show how old I am,
and two, show how much nostalgia I have for those 'good old days'.
Sorry if my ramblings bored anyone.
Rick Bensene
The Old Calculator Web Museum
http://www.geocities.com/oldcalculators
Received on Mon Nov 22 1999 - 18:09:30 GMT