20 Oct
1999
20 Oct
'99
7:06 a.m.
CLASSICCMP(a)trailing-edge.com wrote:
They certainly did. The same form factor was used in the Eagle (MV)
family, but in most of those machines the cards sit on their sides.
An interesting aside: The larger MVs (10K, etc) load microcode from disk,
which means that the machine, when in its just-powered-on-electrical-vegitable
state, must be able to mount and traverse a file system. DG's
solution to the problem? When the MV initially powers on it sports an
instruction set straight out of the Nova 800, save for the weird
autoincrement/autodecrement locations and a few other oddball bits of
the nova ISA.
I'm not
sure. The Nova certainly used large boards - 15" * 15"
- and while the original nova (and I believe supernova) and
nova 1200 got by with just one, it the 800 family used two of
those huge things. Since mechanical engineering was never a
strong suit at DG it's generally accepted to use a rubber mallet
or wooden drift to seat those boards into the backplane...
And some of the later DG Nova-descended CPU's (for example, the S/230)
packed an amazing amount of parts on those huge boards! Were you the one who posted looking for an S/130,
Chris? Hate to tell
you this, but I had a half-dozen of 'em two years ago - if you'd only
been reading then!
Yep, that was me. Timing is everything, both in digital logic and life...
Best,
Chris
--
Chris Kennedy
chris(a)mainecoon.com
http://www.mainecoon.com
PGP fingerprint: 4E99 10B6 7253 B048 6685 6CBC 55E1 20A3 108D AB97