CPU and OS

--- Reuben Reyes <reyes(a)orion.ae.utexas.edu> wrote: I seriously looked at bidding on it, but I didn't want to pay the shipping charges for a system I probably wouldn't fire up for at least a year given what I already have in my pipeline (still digesting a load of PDP-11s - two 11/34a, one 11/24 plus disks/tape) I mentioned to someone in the room that if I'd seen this on a table at a Hamfest for $20, I'd have bought it on the spot, but the shipping charges scared me away. Did anyone on the list pick it up? The seller mentioned no monitor and that it should be "normal", but ISTR that mine had a single DB-25 with video and soft keys, not two connectors like this one. It might or might not be compatible with an old IBM MDA CRT; it's been years since I fired mine up. Got all the docs, though. We bought ours at Software Results Corp (those COMBOARD guys) for an unfinished product that would be recognizable today as a WAN terminal server/router called the Node Box. It was being developed in C, rather than assembler, like our other products, and it was deemed cheapest to use the P-E box for a development environment and pipe the assembler output of the internal C compiler into our own assembler which produced a particular variety of relocatable object module that allowed us to dovetail the C code with our pre-existing assembler library and harware primitives. I suppose given the state of C compilers and license fees in 1983, it made sense at the time. I know we had to develop our own assembler in 1979 because there was none to buy that ran under VMS or RSTS (our working environment 'til the end in 1995). I still have the world's supply of Node Boxes - MC68000 w/MMU, 4 proprietary slots, 3.5" floppy (in 1983, remember!), lots of blinky lights, and a 4-port DMA serial card (dual Z8530 w/68450(?) DMAC) or 8-port PIO serial. I suppose if I were supremely bored, I could hack a Linux kernel to it, but I'd have to completely redo the MMU stuff because the old 68451 MMU is not register-compatible with the 68851. As it is, it runs a real-time exec designed and built by Dr. John Goltz of Compuserve fame. Got all the sources, etc., somewhere on an MSCP disk. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail - only $35 a year! http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/