Qbus HDLC controller -- a "what is it" board

--- Jonathan Engdahl &lt;engdahl(a)cle.ab.com&gt; wrote: I just asked my old boss from Software Results and he thinks this might have been known as an IRMA. ACC at least had a product for DEC boxes that presented the appearance of being a 3270-ish device. I don't know if that means that this board emulates a 3274 (PU Type 2) or not, but SNA COMBOARDs did it with an 8Mhz 68000 w/128-512Kb of RAM and either a Z8530 (newer designs) or COM5025 (older designs). We had our own DMA engine built from PALs that looked like a block of memory space to the 68K processor... made programming really easy! (Especially on the Q22 bus - it was just a direct map of the Qbus to 68K space - no wierd translations on the board side - I've used a COMBOARD-Q to test RAM in a PDP-11). There were several companies from the late 1970s through the early 1990s that produced DEC<->IBM products - Software Results, ACC, Sympact, and a few more. Eventually, DEC got into it as well, making life hard for us small fry that only had a few products. It wasn't always like that; prior to 1984, DEC used to throw us leads because they didn't have anything that would do what a COMBOARD could do. Grow the market enough and people will come from all corners to get a slice of it. If there are no other takers, I'm interested, purely from the historical standpoint of working for a competitor and being curious how they did it. I have no software or docs and will probably never power it up, but I can at least show people that for DEC<->IBM comms, "there's more than one way to do it". ;-) -ethan P.S. - Yes, I know I still owe you a box of quad handles. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get email alerts & NEW webcam video instant messaging with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com