OEM minis /was Re: Front Panel Update

Varian bought the design of the 620. I forget the name of the original firm, but I have a brochure on it. Weird things happen. CDC rebadged small VAX machines and Nova 3s, for example, even with their minicomputer line intact.

On Tue, Jun 9, 2015 at 6:45 PM, Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net> wrote: > >> On Jun 9, 2015, at 5:58 PM, tony duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote >> >>> WTF? Varian was a competitor of DEC. They made minis themselves. Sounds >>> extremely strange that one would take a DEC mini, and put a Varian badge >>> on it. Did someone try to make a joke? >> >> I will always think of Varian as a maker of (very high quality) vacuum equipment. >> >> I am sure this was not a joke. It wasn't just the name, the switch handles were all green, the silkscreening >> was different, etc. It was a normal PDP8/e inside, though. It was part of a piece of lab equipment (I forget >> what) and I had to do a minor repair on the PDP8/e side (this was over 20 years ago...). I was pleased to >> see that apart from a custom interface board, the rest of it was standard DEC boards, so the printsets I >> had applied. > > Interesting. Varian is a microwave equipment company; I have one of their TWTs sitting on my H960 at home. Vacuum equipment, I could believe that. But yes, Varian made a 16 bit minicomputer; I had a handbook for it at one time (now lost, I suspect). And if memory serves, the reason is that there was one in the Computer Science department at the University of Illinois where I studied. I remember nothing about the architecture, other than the fact it supported user microprogramming. > > Possibly the OEM PDP8 predates that device. Or possibly it wasn?t enough of a competitor for DEC to stop doing OEM business with Varian