> I'm not sure that the congress had much to do with the spec's for that
> militarized microVax ...
>
> Dick
Actually, it was for a family of Mil-Spec'd computers which were pretty
much Vax-like to run ADA and the Ada Language System for the military
rather than a ruggedized Microvax.
GE, RCA, and Raytheon, IIRC, were designing and implementing special
silicon to allow the military to have their own computer architecture
which would be required for future projects.
Of course, DEC's release of the 78032 chip pretty much rendered this
obsolete and the competing architectures dried up and the funding went
away as Raytheon did the ruggedized Vaxes for the Patriot control
systems and as GE and RCA eventually became one company and the RCA
Solid State development stuff in Somerset, NJ went I don't know where.
I couldn't figure why they didn't look at the Z8000 and 68020 and
NS16032 (later 32016 and 32032) architectures which were solidifying at
about the same time -- except these were government plans pushed by
what Eisenhower called the "Military-Industrial Complex" and would've
given the government folks jobs for years overseeing production,
availability and multiple sourceing the silicon for the soon-to-be
dead Ada Language System from SofTech (which is another horror story I
witnessed part of at Fort Monmouth>.
(classiccmp tie in: yes it was the same SofTech that purchased UCSD pascal...)
Bill
I found a couple of interstings hit on the google search for this:
http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usassi/ssipubs/pubs98/evlutech/evlutech.pdf
Mentions the Military Computer Family platform was a 15 year old project
that they abandoned in 1984.
http://www.ece.utexas.edu/~perry/work/pre83bib.html
Received on Wed Sep 12 2001 - 10:18:37 BST