Software Results Corp Unibus 68000 board?

--- CLASSICCMP(a)trailing-edge.com wrote: There aren't many people in the world who know more than I (at this point, probably nobody ;-) I never expected anyone to ever want to use this stuff ever again. I almost certainly made that board. I started there around 700-800. I even seem to remember that particular one. When I get around to snarfing up the backup tapes and sticking them on CD, I'll be sure to look that one up. It really does ring a bell. We only made that model up to around 1300-1400, IIRC (yes, starting at "1"; I still have some working Rev 1 boards with double digit serial numbers). The dates of the chips do _not_ reflect the manufacturing date, BTW. At one point, we had several *years* supplies of certain ICs due to aggressive overbuying by our comptroller to avoid the shortages that plagued us in the early days. It's why we had *tubes* of 50256 DRAMs that bought at $80 per chip that didn't get used until the price had fallen to $35 per chip. :-( Some of those same chips later ended up in my Amiga when I salvaged an engineering prototype from the dumpster. I know which ones they are by the hand-drawn "U number" identifying labels still stuck to the tops. I haven't exactly agreed to post this stuff. It's a massive clot of MACRO, 68K assembler and C code that while not exactly commercially viable would be a major pain on my part to package up to be useful to anyone. As an employee, it took me weeks on the clock to get things to the point where I could build the software from scratch. Also, the C compiler used by the COMBOARD-I products is *not* VAX-C, it's Whitesmith's C and AFAIK I don't have the power to grant those licenses (SRC did, but the corporation dissolved years ago). We never ported our older products to VAX-C, only the newer Qbus and VAX-BI products. There was no point - the customer received binaries and _we_ had no problem using a 12-year-old compiler for 12-year-old code. It was ancient tools, but to the final days, I could incorporate changes to the source and have a new production tree ready to ship in 5 hours of disk thrashing (from typing *one* build command, I might add!) In short, it's possibly of archeological use, but unless you *really* want to speak Bisync to some IBM hardware with VMS 4.5 - 5.4, I don't know how useful any of it would be. There is source code for PDP-11 products, but I am even less confident of being able to even make a working binary distribution tape. I _have_ all the stuff but I haven't done a single thing with it since 1994. The original Unibus board is historically fascinating, but not very extensible. There's a later Unibus board, the COMBOARD-II, that has an entirely different and incompatible DMA interface (transparent to the user because those details are hidden in the driver) with 128K of 4164 DRAMs, but the same printer interface and COM5025. For me, at least, our final products, the COMBOARD-Q (Qbus w/Z8530 Dual SIO and 512K RAM) or the COMBOARD-BI (10Mhz 68010, BI interface, 2Mb RAM and Z8530) are the ones most likely to be turned into something interesting. Unfortunately, the worlds supply of available Q-boards (as we called them in-house) is approximately two, and one of *those* was removed from the walls of the trade show booth, and is lacking in the basic ECOs to be operational. I have crates of COMBOARD-I and COMBOARD-II models, but I do not have a working test bed since my DWBUA BI-to-Unibus adapter board smoked. :-( The VAX 8300 works just fine, but I have no way to test Unibus boards beyond basic boot functions in a PDP-11 test bed (with that Fluke 9010 that's been mentioned in the other thread). Sorry to rain on your parade, but given the freeze-dried nature of the software, you'd have to present a pretty convincing argument for me to divert the tens of hours it would take to whip up something useful and even then, you'd need at least another COMBOARD and modem-eliminator to do as much as demonstrate it (we used to use two COMBOARDs, of any variety, to move files between VAXen - SRC never evolved to using any sort of modern LAN technology like Ethernet - we had point-to-point Bisync links, at cost, between any machines we cared to have). Well... The PCB you have is Rev 3. The Rev 1 boards are dated 1979, and the initial prototype originally had a .6" wide socket for the XC68000 processor because it was designed from the preliminary spec sheets from Motorola. It was quite a surprise to the COMBOARD-I designers when they learned that the chip was 1" wide! What may have happened is that the COMBOARD-I was designed before the RL11 or RX211 were available to the public, creating the external appearance that they were first. I am pretty certain that SRC had dual-height grant cards before DEC did because we had our own part number for them. The older, tiny DEC cards were GC727 cards and we called ours the "GC747" card because it was bigger (like Boeing airplanes). I've described the GC747 on the list before - the PCB itself had a built-in curved T-handle at the top and was stencilled in red with a face of a dinosaur and was called the "Grantasaurus Rex". It even made an appearance in a photo in "The DEC Professional", but there's no way I could cite issue and page numbers. As soon as I get my flatbed scanner back from loan, I'll slap it and the COMBOARD line on it and make some scans for the Field Guide. I at least have time to do that. I did find the "COMBOARD PROGRAMMER'S AND MAINTENANCE MANUAL" and the "COMBOARD HARDWARE SELF-INSTALLATION SUPPLIMENT" guides (35 double-sided pages, combined). I'd pass them along for the cost of duplicating/shipping. I could scan them, too, if anyone _really_ wanted to put third-party docs up on a web page. Trivia note: COMBOARDs met VAXen when a customer of DEC who was also a customer of Software Results Corp declined to buy a VAX unless it could talk to the IBM mainframe as well as the PDP-11 he already had. Because DEC wanted to migrate their customer base, one of the founders of Software Results went to Maynard to port the software. I'm told that he used VAX-11/780 S/N 6 for his efforts, a DEC in-house sales demo machine. Our hero was apparently puzzled that the sales staff was upset that he kept crashing the machine during driver development *while they were attempting customer demos* On most of our boards, there was our 800 number for service - 1-800-SRC-DATA. Up until a couple of years ago, it rang to my home office number. I finally disconnected it when I had no more paying customers and was tired of getting billed for other people calling the wrong number. -ethan ===== Infinet has been sold. The domain is going away in February. Please send all replies to erd(a)iname.com __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com