On May 8, 2011,
at 4:02 PM, Roger Ivie wrote:
On Sun, 8
May 2011, David Griffith wrote:
Given that old Soviet knockoffs of pdp11 cpus can
be found on ebay, I was wondering if anyone else has thought of making S100 boards
containing said processors.
I'm pretty certain there used to be one. Osprey, IIRC, built around
a J-11.
The Osprey was done by Strobe Data Inc. It's still produced I believe. The
Osprey is an ISA or PCI product though.
I have their Data General board set (Hawk board), it's pretty cool.
I am curious. How would such a combination work in practice?
For example, the Osprey version was designed to be able to run
PDP-11 operating systems within a PC environment and had
additional software to support the use of files on the PC
as if they were raw devices on the PDP-11 (either Qbus or
Unibus) so that the normal device drivers on the PDP-11
could access the data in the files on the PC. As a result,
it is possible that the PC continued to operate in the normal
fashion while the PDP-11 was a coprocessor.
If an S100 board had a PDP-11 CPU, then would that
become the master CPU? How would device drivers
designed for a Qbus or Unibus do disk I/O? How
would serial ports to a terminal operate? Just a few
questions which are of interest since my background
in hardware extends about as far as just being able to
recognize Qbus and Unibus boards and insert them
into a slot.
Jerome Fine
