I was poking around the links Jochen Kunz posted earlier, which led me
to Dave Rand's web site. Dave, along with George Scolaro, were the
originators of the PC532 project, both worked at Nat Semi at one
point, and had a hand in several other 32k designs including the PD32
that was published in Byte magazine (Nov '85?) and then included as a
reprint in the Nat Semi 32k Design Kit. (The PD32 was Dave, George, and
one Trevor Marshall actually).
There's an archive of the PC532 mailing list at www.bungi.com. I'd
forgotten the excitement surrounding this when it started back in
88/89 - it was such a challenge and opportunity to the folks on
comp.sys.nsc.32k and the Minix community, to actually pick it up and
run with it...
I'd be curious to hear about any other "open" hardware projects from
this or an earlier era in the Unix community - say, 85-95, when the
relentless progress of Moore's Law, Wintel, and Jolitz' 386BSD and its
offspring made it impractical or at least less compelling to pursue
this kind of thing seriously.
While I'm thinking of Bill Jolitz - Jochen, thanks for bringing the
Symmetric 375 to my attention. I was unaware of it, but love it - what
a great little package! I'd love to get my hands on one... Surely this
box enjoyed a fair bit of success? Time to Google...
--
Steve Jones smj_at_spamfree.crash.com Arlington, Mass.
CRASH!! Computing (Remove the "spamfree" portion) 781 / XXX - XXXX
"The measure of an operating system is in the abstractions it provides."
-- Daniel L. Murphy, creator of TECO
Received on Sat Aug 03 2002 - 13:03:01 BST