31 Mar
2015
31 Mar
'15
8:12 a.m.
On 03/31/2015 08:50 AM, Al Kossow wrote:
Forgot to pay attention to the date. There was a 10mb card Xerox made, the only
place I ever saw one was in the guts of a high-end laser printer, don't know the
model number. I didn't bother grabbing it at the time. There couldn't have been
that many Xerox printers that had Unibus in them.
The Xerox 9700 was powered by a PDP 11/34 or 11/34a. The mini handled data input from
the 9-track
tape drive, 8" floppy, hard disk, and optional Xerox Ethernet and Channel (Bus &
Tag) interfaces.
Human interface was through an ADM3 terminal. They were rock solid, high throughput
workhorses.
Rated for 100 pages per minute (8.5x11" paper), they could run 23 hours a day,
shutting down only
for resupply. I still have almost all of the docs on our old 9700, and another list
member has the
computer itself (though it appears to have died somewhere along the line).
The follow-on 4050/4090 models were powered by a J-11 (11/70 on a chip) and a custom
backplane and
card system. It came stock with dual MFM hard disks, 5.25" floppy drive, and 9T tape
drive.
Options included two additional hard disks, 8" floppy, 3.5" floppy (later), QIC
tape, 3480/3490 tape
drives, Bus & Tag interface, and Xerox Ethernet. Human interface was through an ADM11
terminal,
often a Link brand multi-protocol unit. I still have several of these machines in my
shop, though
none in production.
--Shaun