CPU and OS

From: Ethan Dicks <ethan_dicks_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Mon Feb 12 08:21:31 2001

--- Reuben Reyes <reyes_at_orion.ae.utexas.edu> wrote:
> Thanks Ethan,
>
> After checking shipping for 70 lb at $38 and my wife grumbling
> about how i should use the $ on her for Valentine's day i did not
> bid on it. I still would like to have one but maybe some other
> time or place.

I seriously looked at bidding on it, but I didn't want to pay the
shipping charges for a system I probably wouldn't fire up for at
least a year given what I already have in my pipeline (still digesting
a load of PDP-11s - two 11/34a, one 11/24 plus disks/tape)

I mentioned to someone in the room that if I'd seen this on a table at
a Hamfest for $20, I'd have bought it on the spot, but the shipping
charges scared me away.

Did anyone on the list pick it up? The seller mentioned no monitor
and that it should be "normal", but ISTR that mine had a single DB-25
with video and soft keys, not two connectors like this one. It might
or might not be compatible with an old IBM MDA CRT; it's been years
since I fired mine up. Got all the docs, though.

We bought ours at Software Results Corp (those COMBOARD guys) for an
unfinished product that would be recognizable today as a WAN terminal
server/router called the Node Box. It was being developed in C,
rather than assembler, like our other products, and it was deemed
cheapest to use the P-E box for a development environment and pipe
the assembler output of the internal C compiler into our own assembler
which produced a particular variety of relocatable object module that
allowed us to dovetail the C code with our pre-existing assembler
library and harware primitives. I suppose given the state of C
compilers and license fees in 1983, it made sense at the time. I know
we had to develop our own assembler in 1979 because there was none to
buy that ran under VMS or RSTS (our working environment 'til the end in
1995).

I still have the world's supply of Node Boxes - MC68000 w/MMU, 4 proprietary
slots, 3.5" floppy (in 1983, remember!), lots of blinky lights, and a 4-port
DMA serial card (dual Z8530 w/68450(?) DMAC) or 8-port PIO serial. I
suppose if I were supremely bored, I could hack a Linux kernel to it, but
I'd have to completely redo the MMU stuff because the old 68451 MMU is not
register-compatible with the 68851. As it is, it runs a real-time exec
designed and built by Dr. John Goltz of Compuserve fame. Got all the
sources, etc., somewhere on an MSCP disk.




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Received on Mon Feb 12 2001 - 08:21:31 GMT

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