EPAY DEC Qbus Z-80

On Oct 5, 2010, at 9:00 PM, Ian King wrote: It's been just shy of a quarter-century so my memory on this is going to be a little rusty :P VMI was a small firm located in Berkeley, California which made a collection of embedded coprocessors that they sold as "Bridge Boards". A typical board had between two and four coprocessors and generally included serial and parallel hardware (I believe a number of Unibus boards ended up being sold to a firm that packaged them as print servers). Each system consisted of one or more bridge boards, host-side software and a board-side BIOS that fielded calls and interacted with the host-side software in order to perform keyboard, terminal and disk I/O. Sometime around 1986 or 87 VMI was purchased by Ross Microsystems; their dying gasp was a bridge board that connected to an external chassis in order to support AT cards. Generally speaking only well behaved applications that only tried to interact with the hardware through the BIOS were supported. The software for this stuff is probably lost forever. The Intel BIOS was written by John Hinkley who co-founded Ronin with me to build the Hurricane accelerators for the Amiga; he subsequently wrote Vistapro; he might have some leads. -- Chris Kennedy chris at mainecoon.com AF6AP http://www.mainecoon.com PGP KeyID 108DAB97 PGP fingerprint: 4E99 10B6 7253 B048 6685 6CBC 55E1 20A3 108D AB97 "Mr. McKittrick, after careful consideration..."