30 Jun
2011
30 Jun
'11
10:59 a.m.
Not sure what the limitations are, but Jim Austin
(whom you met, once)
has two CX-11s and a bunch of cables and probably some some
peripherals, as he has at least two IBM
mainframes. IIRC one DX-11 has LEDs and the other has lamps, though I
think the LED one isn't complete. They came from a nearby university,
when they scrapped an Amdahl mainframe and a lot of related DE stuff
about 15 years ago. They also had a couple of QBus systems with IBM
channel interface -- but they were rather smaller boxes! They were used
to hang a couple of PDP-11 systems off the IBM or Amdahl; as I
understand it, the PDPs were comms controllers for the mainframes.
Mine came from Cambridge University at about the same time, and AFAIK
they werre used for much the same purpose -- that is using PDP11s as
frontends to an IBM mainfram. The PDP11s were stufferd iwtrh comms cards
-- DMC11s, DMR11s, DUP11s, even the odd DJ11 (16 channel asynchronous
mux). Others wanted the 11/34 CPUs, but the (interesting to me) comms
stuff all came home with me ;-)
Both my DX11s have LED panels.
A bit later I was offerend an 'IBM compatible ethernet interface'. No,
not an ISA/PCI/etc card. A box made by Storagetek to connect to an IBM
channel. I have no idea what I'll use it for (not having got an IBM
mainframe), but I certainly wasn;t going to miss that!
-tony