28 Nov
2006
28 Nov
'06
3 p.m.
Tony Duell wrote:
And the Whitechapel, I'd say - OK, so it's just a Unix workstation, but there
weren't many people around at the time prepared to commit themselves to the
32000 line of CPUs.
The later Whitechapel Hitec series used MIPS R2000 CPUs IIRC.
Odd machines. Theres' a motherboard with the PC/AT form factor, but the
CPU isn't on it. It actually contains serial, SCSI, ST412, floppy,
keyboard, etc interfaces. There are 8 expansion slots. 3 are 16 bit ISA,
the other 5 are DIN 41612 connectors. One takes the CPU board (which also
has MMU and some more serial ports), another takes the video board, the
remaing 3 take RAM cards.
I have one complete machine, not in an original case, but in a standard
PC/AT tower case. And quite a few spare boards in various states of
complete-ness.
Oh and a word of warning for the 32016-based MG1 Whitechapels. The
mainboard has 512K RAM, but the boot ROM needs 1.5M to boot. If it
doesn't find it, it flashes out a 'multiple bit DRAM error' on the
diagnostic LED. You then go insane trying to find a non-existant fault in
the memory, memory control, or arbitration circuitry. Please don't ask
how I found this out...
-tony
So what
do some of the starrier UK and mainland
European machines go for? Heck which are they? All I
Well, Some of the more interesting UK machines are :