From: ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell)
A serious question : Was the Pentium ever used in a non-PC compatible?
Part of our experiment here (the Supernova detector hanging off of
AMANDA, a neutrino detector with the oldest sensors embedded in the
Ice being at least 10 years old ;-) uses a pair of VME crates with
Pentium processors running RedHat Linux.
The cards pretty much have everything on them - disk, network, video,
serial... The VME crates are just a chunk of I/O space to the
processor cards AFAIK. The OS doesn't talk to any VME cards, that's
all up to our own app.
For all intents and purposes, it might as well be an industry-standard
Intel PC with strange I/O slots - architecturally, though it's close
enough to a PeeCee that it just boots up a with a standard Linux boot
floppy and installs right from a standard CD-ROM, so lack of PCI or
ISA slots aside, you might call it PC-compatible. Standing in front
of it, though, if you didn't know what it was, most people probably
wouldn't recognize it as a "PC".
-ethan