9 Jun
2015
9 Jun
'15
3:45 p.m.
On Jun 9, 2015, at 5:58 PM, tony duell <ard at
p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote:
Interesting. Varian is a microwave equipment company; I have one of their TWTs sitting on
my H960 at home. Vacuum equipment, I could believe that. But yes, Varian made a 16 bit
minicomputer; I had a handbook for it at one time (now lost, I suspect). And if memory
serves, the reason is that there was one in the Computer Science department at the
University of Illinois where I studied. I remember nothing about the architecture, other
than the fact it supported user microprogramming.
Possibly the OEM PDP8 predates that device. Or possibly it wasn?t enough of a competitor
for DEC to stop doing OEM business with Varian.
paul
WTF? Varian was a competitor of DEC. They made
minis themselves. Sounds
extremely strange that one would take a DEC mini, and put a Varian badge
on it. Did someone try to make a joke?
I will always think of Varian as a maker of (very high quality) vacuum equipment.
I am sure this was not a joke. It wasn't just the name, the switch handles were all
green, the silkscreening
was different, etc. It was a normal PDP8/e inside, though. It was part of a piece of lab
equipment (I forget
what) and I had to do a minor repair on the PDP8/e side (this was over 20 years ago...).
I was pleased to
see that apart from a custom interface board, the rest of it was standard DEC boards, so
the printsets I
had applied.