Chris Elmquist wrote:
On Thursday (06/16/2011 at 04:55PM -0400), Diane Bruce
wrote:
Interesting. The CCI1016 (DHV11, DZQ11, DHQ11 replacement) looks like
a Comtrol RocketPort... which is a 16-port PCI multiport serial card
I helped develop back in '94. It appears as though they have put some
kind of LSI-11 on PCI bus and are then using a mix of off-the-shelf and
custom PCI adapters for the various peripherals.
Maybe the CPUs are actually a PC running an emulator??
For those of you who might be interested, I contacted Transduction
followed by The Logical Company who seems to be responsible
for the actual NuPDQ-1000 Qbus board.
I have been able to confirm that an emulator is running an Intel chip,
probably at least a core 2 duo, although I am not very clear about
any of the other details.
In addition, it seems highly probable that rather than a VT100 (or
other serial terminal) connected as the console device, the emulator
application program also supports a PC VGA/keyboard port which
can be used instead of the serial line at CSR=177560 to a VT100.
In short, the NuPDQ-1000 Qbus board (with the hardware to
emulate a PDP-11) seems to serve as a direct Qbus interface
to a Qbus backplane which is also available. This directly
supports any Qbus hardware which has not been supported
(emulated) by the emulator / hardware combinations that are
available.
If there is any additional interest and response to my information,
I will continue to add additional information as it becomes available.
In particular, I would be extremely interested in how the emulator
code is supported, or more specifically the source of that code.
The answer to this question would answer almost every other
question.
What I am really confused about is how this new development is
justified (i.e. cost effective). Are there that many PDP-11 Qbus
systems out there performing non-critical applications which are
more cost effective to continue to run the PDP-11 software?
I had thought that by this time, most of these systems had found
other solutions to continue to run. In particular, Strobe Data
offers a hardware solution and emulators offer a software
solution. The NuPDQ-1000 seems to combine both, but
at a much higher cost. I don't yet have a price on the actual
NuPDQ-1000 board.
Jerome Fine