Applikon Workstation?

Sean Caron scaron at umich.edu
Tue Aug 25 16:09:28 CDT 2015


The name sounds familiar ... not sure why ... it turns out they had their
main offices here in Ann Arbor, MI at some point, as an aside.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applicon

Best,

Sean


On Tue, Aug 25, 2015 at 5:02 PM, Holm Tiffe <holm at freibergnet.de> wrote:

> In the nineties I've workes as electronican and system administrator at the
> institue of geophyics at our local University of Mining and Technology here
> in Freiberg Germany.
> Some day I've got a call from Motorola in Munich, they wanted to get rid of
> some old computers and asked if we had some use for them, I've sayed yes.
>
> As far as I know we got 3 Computers, one was an 68000 Unix system from
> philips, some kind of Microcomputer development system for 8080 or 8085,
> I've got the system running but since there wasn't much software on the
> disk we had not much use for this thing. The disk was alsready dying and
> lived not that long.
> The next thing was a desktop VME System from Motorola, IMHO equipped with
> an 68010, some MMUs, an color Monitor ad Harddisk and Floppy.. it run some
> kind of VDOS (or so) .. or VME-DOS or soemthing.., I remember that we had
> some
> documentiation for it and I've reinstalled that VDOS.. but not much use for
> that thing also.
>
> The 3rd Computer was the most interestng one. That thing was labeled
> "Applikon Workstation" (as far as I remember, may be Applicon..).
> That was some kind of a microvax made by Schlumberger.
> It had an CPU that sat in a QBUS Backplane and a QBUS to UNIBUS Bridge.
> The CPU was only a double sized board (!), an Emulex UC07 conected the disk
> to the machine and so far as I remember there was some kind of graphics
> board on the unibus side. I've repaired the CPU Board by changing the
> RSA232 Drivers for the console and the beast came to live. I've fiddeled
> around with the TK50 Tapes containing VMS4.6 (if my memory not fails) but
> could'nt get warm with VMS... Installed NetBSD and failed.
> NetBSD was'nt booting from the SCSI Drives with the Emulex, someone sent
> me an UDA50 and I was able to install and boot NetBSD, but had to key in
> the loader at the chevron every time I had to boot..
> I've sent the Emulex to Ragge for diagnostics and never got it back.
> The Machine ran for years as ftp server at the institute until I've pulled
> the plug. Have never seen a picture from that graphics board.
> I've leaved the University in 1989, the machine sat on the garret of the
> building to this time, I'm pretty sure it's long gone...
>
>
> Now I'm fiddeling with VAXen again and that old thing came to mind, looked
> with google but could'nt find a machine like this, not even a Microvax with
> a only doubles sized CPU Board like an KDF-11.
>
> The question now is...is someone knowing of a beast like this?
>
> Regards,
>
> Holm
>
> --
>       Technik Service u. Handel Tiffe, www.tsht.de, Holm Tiffe,
>      Freiberger Straße 42, 09600 Oberschöna, USt-Id: DE253710583
>   www.tsht.de, info at tsht.de, Fax +49 3731 74200, Mobil: 0172 8790 741
>
>


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