30 Jan
2024
30 Jan
'24
3:48 p.m.
On Jan 30, 2024, at 3:25 PM, Bill Degnan via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
thanks. I suppose that gives me enough idea what time period and use they
had
VMEbus was widely used as a successor to MultiBus in the workstation market, a lot of
vendors that started with MultiBus (Sun/SGI for example) switched to VME because they were
using 68K anyway and it a supported full 32-bit address and data space, where MultiBus was
mostly designed for 8080/8085/8086 (and even 8086 required some extension to support
16-bit data bus width and 20-bit address space).
The biggest uses of VMEbus though were in laboratory automation, process control, and
robotics, where it was in competition with both MultiBus and DIO[1] (the bus on the HP
9000-200 and 9000-300 series, which were originally designed as successors to the HP
1000/21MX/2100 series). That's why you'll see a lot of analog and digital I/O
hardware, computer vision systems, motor controllers, and so on in the VMEbus 3U and 6U
form factors. This is also what got VMEbus used in a lot of American defense
applications.
-- Chris