In search of qbus WCS...

Jerome Fine replies: The two CPU boards (I have both) are the dual and the quad 11/03 Qbus versions. I have been told they require a BA-11 box since they are incompatible with the 22 bit backplane found in the BA23 box. Back in the latter part of the 1970s when the 11/03 was released, I understand that the 11/03 was far superior to anything from Intel. Even with just V3.0x of RT-11, users had a sophisticated operating system that was, in my opinion, better than any other single user OS at the time - and with all the improvements still is. I think I used one ONLY once since it is, of course, unable to address more than 56 KBytes (60 KBytes with a 2 KWord I/O page) of memory. Since I want at least 1 MByte of memory, I use at least an 11/23 and usually an 11/83 CPU and run RT11XM all the time. Of course, that is still a bit slow. Most of the time I use Ersatz-11 on a 750 MHz Pentium III, these days with 768 MBytes of memory. The speed is about 15 times an 11/93 - plus I can have a RAM: disk of 512 MBytes if I wish - 16 RT-11 partitions of 32 MBytes each. It should be even more interesting when the 3 GHz Pentium 4 is available at a reasonable price in a year or two - 50 times the speed of an 11/93 anyone? Even SIMH should fly at that point. It would be nice to have an M1 or a QED 11/93, but I can't justify that cost and those are still slower than Ersatz-11 with a 750 MHz Pentium III. I did not realize that the WCS (which I had heard was a feature on these 11/03 CPUs) was a separate option. Sincerely yours, Jerome Fine -- If you attempted to send a reply and the original e-mail address has been discontinued due a high volume of junk e-mail, then the semi-permanent e-mail address can be obtained by replacing the four characters preceding the 'at' with the four digits of the current year.