10 Jan
2004
10 Jan
'04
3:32 p.m.
At 08:15 AM 1/10/04 -0800, you wrote:
Hi, Joe,
*********** REPLY SEPARATOR ***********
On 09-Jan-04 at 18:46 Joe wrote:
Hi Bruce. I haven't heard from you for a while. These aren't VME. I've
heard of a PowerStack II. Possible they were VME. These have a riser board
on the LH side (similar to NLX) with several PCI slots on that and one
short propriatary slot that the floppy drive plugs into. There's also a
riser board at the rear of the machine that the ports are mounted on. There
are three slots for CD and/or hard drives. Those also plug into the rear
riser board. Everything else is on the motherboard.
I picked up two of these yesterday. I searched the
net but didn't find
much information about them but I did find enough so that I know what they
are. However one of the ones that I have doesn't have the rounded top.
Instead the top is flat and it has a rectangular opening in it and a
circuit board sticking up into the opening. It looks like it was made for
an expansion chassis to mate with. Anybody know more about that?
Yes indeed. I used to service the 'PowerStack' VME version systems.
What you have there is one of two possible configurations. One system
type was made
with a PowerPC 603 chip, if I recall, and the other was done
with a VMEbus, designed to run with MVME187 or 197 CPU boards.
The expansion configuration you describe is exactly that. The PowerStack
series
were expanded by popping off the cover, and locking in another
module. I think you could have at least four, possibly a max of six (it has
been at least 11 years since I've seen one). They use SCSI exclusively for
peripheral expansion. No Idiotic Drive Electronics in these monsters!
OS-wise, they were both designed to run with Motorola's System V Unix
release.
I don't recall if other OS's will run on them.
Yeap, AIX, FreeBSD (I think) and Debian Linux. I think there was one
more but I forget.
That's all I remember. Perhaps others will pipe up with corrections or
additions.
OK thanks.
Joe
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Bruce Lane, Owner & Head Hardware Heavy,
Blue Feather Technologies -- http://www.bluefeathertech.com
kyrrin (at) bluefeathertech do/t c=o=m
"If Salvador Dali had owned a computer, would it have been equipped with
surreal ports?"