Jerome Fine wrote:
>
> >no wrote:
>
> > Pricey beasts, those bridges. Looked into that a few years ago when
> > my company was thinking of replacing the 11/45's with the Osprey
> > board. Unibus bridges were about $2500 each.
> > -nick
>
> Jerome Fine replies:
>
> The price of the bridges has not been reduced, but the Osprey was a
> relatively expensive solution - much more than the cost of the bridge
> if I remember correctly. Also, limited in CPU power to the hardware
> that is used. A less expensive solution - the difference effectively
> makes the cost of the bridge zero or even negative - is Ersatz-11
> http://www.dbit.com/
> Obviously you require the commercial version and you still run on
> a PC, but as the speed of the PC increases (at increased cost of
> course), so does Ersatz-11. Not so with the Osprey hardware.
> And I seem to remember that the cost without the bridge was twice
> the cost of even the first the Ersatz-11 license.
>
> I am not saying that Osprey is a bad solution. When I first saw a
> system that used the J11 chip (so that the speed was about identical
> to an 11/93 - maybe a bit faster since the memory may have been
> integrated more efficiently), I was very impressed. It was probably
> about 5 or 6 years ago - well before the commercial version of
> Ersatz-11 which initially arrived without an adapter capability.
> Later, the Osprey solution started to use their own CPU to replace
> the J11 - had to eventually since DEC cut off supply of the J11 chips.
> But the Osprey is still much slower than Ersatz-11 is able to achieve
> now on a Pentium IV. I think that on the fastest Pentium IV, Ersatz-11
> is now able to execute PDP-11 instructions more quickly than any
> other emulator and/or hardware. And since the original trial version
> of Ersatz-11 is probably close to 10 years old, maybe I am not
> even off topic.
>
> Does you company still have the PDP-11/45 systems?
>
Yes, but not for long. They are hooked up to a DC-10 flight simulator
but
part of the Sep 11 aftermath was the downsizing of the airlines and, in
particular, the permanent grounding of our DC-10 fleet. Making this
trainer irrelevant. Its about to be sold.
Received on Fri Dec 14 2001 - 18:07:43 GMT