25 May
1999
25 May
'99
5:53 a.m.
As I remember the DSP-90 was a rockin' machine for
its time...the
'king of servers' machine. Mentor Graphics had a bunch of these sitting
in a room with LOTS of Air Conditioning in it...to act as a simulation
farm for their logic simulation software. As I remember...I think that
the machine used all ECL logic for the CPU. It sucked up a lot of juice,
and made a lot of heat.
I seem to remember, but not completely sure, that the CPU was essentially
an ECL implementation of a 68000...a comparatively very fast 68000.
It should be preserved if possible...Apollos in general *could* have been
the engineering workstation of choice had Apollo not made some silly
'closed architecture' blunders. Their OS and Network environment has
solid features that today are still not real solid in the Unix/NT worlds.
Rick Bensene
Apollo also OEM'd Alliant Computer's FX/8 and FX/1 68020 looking multiple
processor mini-Super. These things had Vector opcodes like a Cray
and ran a BSD looking Unix called Concentrix. AT&T also used 'em
at Bell Labs and Morgan Stanly used 'em on Wall Street.
Slick box with up to 8 cpu's and a number of 68010 or 68020 front end
processors on Multibus or VME bus.
(I worked for Alliant for about 8 months).
Bill
---
bpechter@shell.monmouth.com|pechter@pechter.dyndns.org
Three things never anger: First, the one who runs your DEC,
The one who does Field Service and the one who signs your check.