OP (about the 68000 box) here ? thanks for all the informative comments!
I did spend some time using the 68010-based Apollo workstations, and as I understood it
they were equipped with two processors, one shadowing the other, because not enough
information was saved to completely restart an instruction ? particularly a block transfer
? if a memory paging operation was required. Apparently the 68020 somehow fixed this
problem. (The 68008, BTW, was just a 68000 with limited address space and an 8-bit data
bus. It was primarily targeted at deeply embedded systems, not ?general purpose
computing? applications.)
Thanks for the clarification about V7 Unix not requiring demand paging; this makes
complete sense, since it was never mentioned in any of the documentation I read. And yes,
it it was Unix V7, not ?System 7? (sorry, it was a while ago...).
Thanks for the pointer to the Convergent Technologies boxes. This wasn?t them (the case
was different: it was black, and horizontal-profile), but the functionality looks very
similar; they could easily have had the same motherboard or other guts. Also, I forgot to
mention in my original post that there was a 5-1/4? floppy on this thing, too.
~~
Mark Moulding
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