pdp8/a boards

Upon the date 10:13 PM 10/5/99 +0100, Tony Duell said something like: I can believe this Tony as a European vacuum coating equipment company named Balzers AG (from Liechtenstein) once used PDP-8 systems as a process controller. Therefore I feel it would be quite logical that VG would have made partial pressure analyzers, thin film deposition controllers, gas controllers, etc which interfaced directly to Omnibus. They would have sold them for a much more economical price. If any of you had seen the prices Balzers charged for the same type of equipment, you'd probably concur. I understand even today Balzers uses the old DEC Falcon PDP-11 boards in their BPU-430 Process Control system. The previous BPU-340 controller used a custom crate with four Qbus slots and an M8089 (PDP-11/23) of some variety I can't presently recall and a _verrrry_ limited subset of RT-11 of some unknown version. As an aside to illustrate the high cost of getting anything out of Balzers there were several rather minor bugs in the display text of the user interface of that vacuum deposition system used at my ex-employer. Only one moderately significant functional bug and just a couple of valve labels swapped around and the version number not updated (it still said "TEST" in the software program version number at the main screen heading of the application) and one or two other minor display things. I wanted to have those fixed as the operators got a bit confused with the labels swapped around and a large gate valve could be opened in Service Mode while a loadlock chamber was still under vacuum -which is Not Good. Balzers quoted me approximately US$7000 (!) just to clean up their mistakes. There were two specially modified vacuum coaters made from a basic system they had sold to IBM in the late 80's/early 90's and they would have certainly not have lost any money on just fixing those minor problems especially when each of those modified coaters cost over DM2 million (US$1.2 mil) when new. One is at the parent company in Germany and the other in Jamestown. At $7000, Balzers USA and I figure this was Balzers AG's way to tell me to bug off and don't bother them with old software problems. I used a VG Instruments partial pressure analyzer back in the 80's which is likely the same company under the Vacuum Generators marquis as VG Data Systems. I agree. If I could see some interface connectors to external sensors/probes or markings, etc. it could give me more hints as to what its original use was. Larry, any close-up photos online? Regards, Chris -- -- Christian Fandt, Electronic/Electrical Historian Jamestown, NY USA cfandt(a)netsync.net Member of Antique Wireless Association URL: http://www.antiquewireless.org/