NS32000 & PC532 (was: Re: What's your coolest ISA card?)

From: Ken Seefried <ken_at_seefried.com>
Date: Thu Aug 9 10:22:21 2001

Very educational thread. Didn't know that BBC had a 32000 coprocessor.

I mildly collect old 32000 gear, so if you want to see them go to a good
home, let me know. Especially an MG-1 (:-)), although I'd really like to
find a Ceres-2 or Ceres-3 (built at ETH Switzerland, used by Niklaus Wirth
for a lot of the development of Oberon).

Oh, yeah...and another Heurikon VME532 or parts of same would *really* help
out a bunch!

From: Jeff L Kaneko <jeff.kaneko_at_juno.com>
>> (along with my unbuilt PC532 kit...sigh).
> AHHHGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

You aren't kindding. It only took me a decade to replace that box (only a
few months ago). I'd like to find another one.

From: Bill Gunshannon <bill_at_cs.scranton.edu>
> I still have one of these Opus cards. What's it worth??

Do you still have the software?

From: Sellam Ismail <foo_at_siconic.com>
> No, but I've got an 32016 S-100 CPU board :)

Ouch! That fired a long dormant brain cell. I remember that board.

From: "Iggy Drougge" <optimus_at_canit.se>
> All right, let's educate the ignorant; what exactly is a PC532?

It's a completely public domain computer design done by two NS engineers,
George Scolaro and Dave Rand, in the late '80s. 25MHz 32532 processor (MMU
built in), 32381 FPU, 8 serial ports, 2 scsi busses, expansion bus. They
published the complete hardware & software specs, and put together a few
hundred kits and sold them to folks to build (a la Heathkit). I saved a
bunch of pennies to buy mine.

It orignally ran a port of Minix, but many of the survivors now run NetBSD.
A Google search will turn up what little info survives.

Ken
Received on Thu Aug 09 2001 - 10:22:21 BST