--- ajp me <ajp166_at_bellatlantic.net> wrote:
> The list of companies that also shipped the base dec hardware repackaged is
> rather lone and includes Charles River, ISI,
> DSD, Tektronix and likely many I missed. DEC sold those boards
> (cpu and supporting) as peice parts for the embedded systems...
Before Software Results created the MC68000-based COMBOARD, they used to
ship a similar product that was 100% DEC hardware, 100% SRC software,
called a HASPBOX. One incarnation was an 11/04, later the 11/23. They
all had a COM5025-based serial board (DPV11? DUV11?) and a parallel
interface (DLV11?) to the host PDP-11/VAX. It was, essentially, a
sync serial IO Front End Processor (FEP). The HASPBOX took ASCII data
a block at a time, parallel, and spoke EBCDIC a character at a time, out
the bisync port. The idea was that this PDP-11 took over the burden
of the details of the protocol conversion. Additionally, you could specify
that jobs sent to the IBM could be printed on a line printer attached directly
to the HASPBOX (which is how I got my LPV11), sparing the host PDP-11
of the additional load to the print queues. It may not sound like a big
deal now, but in 1979, it was huge.
The HASPBOX had no disk or tape, so I'm not sure how they loaded the
software. Probably ODT over the console SLU. By the time I worked
there, they had shipped over 1000 COMBOARDs and were feverishly working
on the SNA product line.
-ethan
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Received on Thu Apr 12 2001 - 13:08:41 BST