BI Bus

It was open for a minimal definition of the word open. DEC owned the chip set and protocol and would sell you the chip set if your board was not a competitor to a DEC board. As I recall... A number of outfits purchased the older lowest priced DEC board available to pull the chips for the BI bus to make disk controllers and such since DEC wasn't going to let anyone reverse engineer the set without a major patent fight. DEC cut it's own throat on this one and the BI bus never took hold. They did something similar with the Massbus and Cache-Bus interconnect on the 11/70's. They were always high priced on disks and peripherals (but a lot of their controllers and stuff had the best diags, maint features around). The first DEC controller and disk drive I really liked was the HSC50/RA81. (Well I did like RK05J's and F's) Bill who left DEC around the time of the BI bus release... and has NO proprietary data on 'em. --- bpechter@shell.monmouth.com|pechter@pechter.dyndns.org Three things never anger: First, the one who runs your DEC, The one who does Field Service and the one who signs your check.