A little more Am2900 learning/evaluation kit info

From: Douglas Quebbeman <dhquebbeman_at_theestopinalgroup.com>
Date: Thu Jun 22 07:55:54 2000

> -> While I'd really like to lay my hands on one of these, I
> -> suppose if I wanted to get daring, I could just pull the
> -> ROMs from the Prime and burn my own (The Prime CPUs were
> -> built using the AM2900 family;
>
> Same as all the Microdata systems. Wasn't Prime also Pick based
> systems?

Prime sold a subsystem called Information which was more-or-less
a clone of Pick, and from the mid-80s on, this may have been its
best-selling product (I'm certain it was in the UK). But prior
and subsequent to that, Primes were very prevalent as university
timesharing systems, and laboratory support systems.

The Primos operating system had its initial roots in an older
OS they called DOS, which had some legacy from another Prime
OS, RTOS, which in turn was a port or re-implementation of
Olert/4 and/or SAMTRAN, a Honeywell Controls OS funded by
NASA. Beginning with the P400 processor, Prime systems were
16-bit data/32-bit address versions of the Honeywell Multics
architecture (which was 18-bit data/36-bit address).

-doug q
Received on Thu Jun 22 2000 - 07:55:54 BST