>>>> "Tom" == Tom Jennings
<tomj at wps.com> writes:
Tom> Wow... I missed my opportunity to work on a big 2901-based
Tom> realtime video system, I wanted to work on the thing but it was
Tom> a big stinky military project, otherwise glad I turned it down.
Tom> THe Nova 4's built with a variant though.
DEC used 2901s in a bunch of places. The UDA50 is based on them, as
is the VAX 730. I suspect there are a number of others...
They also turn up in some PDP11 floating point cards (I think the one for
the 11/34, for example).
AFAIK no PDP11 CPU ever used the 2901. 74(S)181s and separate register
chips were generally used there.
And the RX02 floppy drive has a couple of 2901s and a few 2909 sequencers
I don't recall seeing a 2910 in anyting DEC. I have seen 3rd party 'RX02
compatible controllers for SA800 drives' that have a pair of 2901s and a
2910 on them
Classic PERQs didn't use the 2901 at all, but did (alas [1]) use the 2910
sequencer for the CPU microcode and also for the state machine
'microcode' for the ethernet and hard disk interfaces.
[1] Alas because the 2910 is strictly a 12 bit sequencer, it can't really
be extended. Fine for the origianl PERQ 1 (4K control store), but all
later classic PERQs had a 16K control store. A handful of TTL and a
couple of PALs wree used to provide the top 2 bits, a circuit which I
named the '2 bit kludge', pun totally intentional.
As I mentioned a few days back, the PERQ 3a used a pair of 29116s in the
graphics processor. One to calculator main memory addresses, one to
modify the gragphics data.
The Xerox Daybreak seems to have 4 off 2901s in the CPU, with a custom
Xerox sequncer chip.
And the HP9845 that currently fills my bench has the high-speed language
processor option. That contains 4 off 2901s and a 2910 sequencer.
-tony