Collecting Philosophy - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

14 Apr 1998

On Apr 14, 23:07, Tony Duell wrote:

...
  Ouch!!!. Even my standard test for floor loading
wouldn't have found that
 (= Jump up and down hard. If the floor doesn't give way, put the machine
 on it and jump up and down again. If it's still OK, it'll probably stay
 that way). 
Jim now has the flooring from our Department's old machine room -- and now I
know why those floor panels are so heavy :-)

...
  > BTW, the little DX11-alike in the 11/73 was
accompanied by a "Camtech
 > Ethernet QBus Interface". 
...
  The only thing that reminds me of is the Camtech JNT
PADs and iso-ether
 PADs used in UK universities as part of the JANET network. I've not got
 any, alas (I'd quite like one...), but I seem to remember that at least
 the JNT pads were Z-80 based and had a synchronous serial port connection
 to the outside world talking some kind of X25... 
We had several, but they all got cannibalised.  They were indeed Z80-based, and
had lots of SIOs, DARTs, and a few PIOs in them too.  Neat cases as well.

...
  I have no idea what it talked instead of TCP/IP, but
it'll probably be
 something that was common in the UK at the time. Any ideas? I can look
 back through PERQ and Torch XXX manuals to see if anything leaps out.. 
I've no idea.  I imagined that Camtech made other ethernet stuff, and if they
could make such a good-looking QBus ethernet i/f I thought there must be more
around.  I've never found any, though, nor have I ever found anyone who could
tell me much about long-gone Camtech (apart from JNT PADs).

-- 

Pete						Peter Turnbull
						Dept. of Computer Science
						University of York