Front Panel Update - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

9 Jun 2015

Unisys   absorbed  Varian mini computers ie  the   V 77
nice  chart in this  pdf  of the family tree
 http://rmarsh.cs.und.edu/CLASS/CS451/HANDOUTS/os-unisys.pdf

by the  way the  purchase agreement  was  dated  1977 between  Uni and Var

 we have lots of manuals in the   catacombs.... unisys/varian/burroughs

Ed# _www.smecc.org_ (http://www.smecc.org)  

In a message dated 6/9/2015 3:45:11 P.M. US Mountain Standard Time,  
paulkoning at comcast.net writes:

...
   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.

paul