13 Mar
2019
13 Mar
'19
6:31 a.m.
On Mar 12, 2019, at 10:10 PM, Fritz Mueller via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Hmmm, are these the atex racks seen lurking in the background of that recent storage
space trawl down near Houston?
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-DEC-PDP-11-34-Minicomputer-With-Kennedy-Ta…
Interesting. Atex is, or was at one time anyway, a manufacturer of typesetting systems
for newspapers. DEC was also in that business with Typeset-11 (TMS-11) but Atex was more
successful, certainly for smaller newspapers because it used less expensive PDP11 models.
The "multi-processor bus" thing is curious. And I wonder what the terminals are
like. If they are typesetting terminals, I think they support some sort of WYSIWYG
editing setup -- that too was a competitive advantage vs. the "mark-up" approach
(sort of like Runoff on steroids) that Typeset-11 offered. Looking at the keyboards would
give a clue.
The "11-34 minicomputer... J-11 CPU" description is a bit strange. Possibly a
dual CPU setup with one of each? But that seems strange because those two are from
different generations, and interfacing them together would be tricky and not all that
useful.
paul