9 Aug
2001
9 Aug
'01
3:22 a.m.
Very educational thread. Didn't know that BBC had a 32000 coprocessor.
I mildly collect old 32000 gear, so if you want to see them go to a good
home, let me know. Especially an MG-1 (:-)), although I'd really like to
find a Ceres-2 or Ceres-3 (built at ETH Switzerland, used by Niklaus Wirth
for a lot of the development of Oberon).
Oh, yeah...and another Heurikon VME532 or parts of same would *really* help
out a bunch!
From: Jeff L Kaneko <jeff.kaneko(a)juno.com>
You aren't kindding. It only took me a decade to replace that box (only a
few months ago). I'd like to find another one.
From: Bill Gunshannon <bill(a)cs.scranton.edu>
(along with my
unbuilt PC532 kit...sigh).
AHHHGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!! I still have one of these Opus cards. What's it
worth??
Do you still have the software?
From: Sellam Ismail <foo(a)siconic.com>
No, but I've got an 32016 S-100 CPU board :)
Ouch! That fired a long dormant brain cell. I remember that board.
From: "Iggy Drougge" <optimus(a)canit.se>
All right, let's educate the ignorant; what
exactly is a PC532?
It's a completely public domain computer design done by two NS engineers,
George Scolaro and Dave Rand, in the late '80s. 25MHz 32532 processor (MMU
built in), 32381 FPU, 8 serial ports, 2 scsi busses, expansion bus. They
published the complete hardware & software specs, and put together a few
hundred kits and sold them to folks to build (a la Heathkit). I saved a
bunch of pennies to buy mine.
It orignally ran a port of Minix, but many of the survivors now run NetBSD.
A Google search will turn up what little info survives.
Ken