rtVAX 300.

On Dec 14, 2012, at 5:55 PM, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote: These boards seem pretty neat. They remind me of the early Linux/Alpha days. I remember early in the Linux/Alpha days one of the methods of getting a cheap Alpha was to buy a system that had a passive PCI backplane and one of the cards, made by an OEM, provided a 21164-based Alpha "home-brew" system for far less than even a Multia from DEC. I'm thinking this VME-based and ISA-based "rtVAX" setup is the same style and probably the father/grandfather of the PCI setup. Given the "rt" prefix, I'm assuming there is a "real-time" thing going on, where these were used for some kind of manufacturing process control and/or industrial system. I remember rumors when Intel was gearing up for Itanium (or was it Pentium III?) production that they were embarrassed that many of their assembly lines still ran a DEC/VMS-based systems for industrial control. I have no idea if that rumor is true or not, but I have little reason to doubt it. This was from the same era when Linux/Intel-based systems were creeping into data centers to run web servers but Dell was still a Sun customer as their HR, Payroll, and order systems were all Sun-based.