19 Apr
2008
19 Apr
'08
3:57 a.m.
On Sat, Apr 19, 2008 at 03:38:51AM -0800, davis wrote:
Ray Arachelian wrote:
I have a Perkin-Elmer workstation (7350?) that has a dual-68K bus-fault
recovery design. It's running System III UNIX. We bought it, way back,
as the cheapest way of getting a multi-user cross-development platform
for our products after COMBOARDs.
It has a console screen and keyboard, and four serial ports for dumb
terminals. ISTR the disk is SASI (but there's probably a SASI<->ST506
converter buried in there somewhere). I _think_ it shipped with a 15MB
disk, but mine had its disk replaced when it was still a full time
development platform, so might have 20-30MB at present.
The screen is mostly text (there might be some limited graphics capabilities),
but has the curious feature of "soft buttons" built into the monitor's
frame, so you apparently _have to_ use their monitor (it's not a generic
sort of plug, either - perhaps a DB25 or DA15).
It booted up the last time I turned it on. I tried to sell it at a hamfest
a while back, but couldn't get an interest in it.
Ah well... fun little box.
-ethan
--
Ethan Dicks, A-333-S Current South Pole Weather at 19-Apr-2008 at 10:50 Z
South Pole Station
PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -84.1 F (-64.5 C) Windchill -122.7 F (-85.9 C)
APO AP 96598 Wind 10.1 kts Grid 10 Barometer 676.2 mb (10772 ft)
Ethan.Dicks at usap.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html
Just out of curiosity, were there any machines out
there that were
built from multiple MC68000's CPU's?
In 1983, Metheus corp, did the classic 68k X 2 cpus to fix the double
bus fault problem on their VLSI design workstation.
I never could figure out how you could get the system into a double page
data/code/stack fault in the exception handler, but it's a known
problem. It just seemed like a lot of bad hardware and OS chicken
shit/walk the line porting of BSD.
I suspect the double 68K bus fault problem solution was a common
Berkeley/USC grad hack.