11 Feb
2011
11 Feb
'11
9:28 a.m.
Roger Ivie [rivie at ridgenet.net] wrote:
If I remember correctly there was $250,000 license fee for the "BI
Corner" if you wanted to design your own BI board.
That doessn't sound open to me.
--
Michael Thompson
During development of VAXBI, we were told (by the
folks
working on it) that it was A) not going to be VAX-specific
(DEC was moving MIPSward at the time) and B) would be open.
We were a bit startled when it was announced as "VAXBI".
It was never open (in the way that UNIBUS was) but it wasn't VAX-only
as the DECsystem 5800 (iirc) used it too.
Antonio 
17 Feb
17 Feb
10:17 p.m.
On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 12:28 PM, Michael Thompson
<michael.99.thompson at gmail.com> wrote:
If I remember correctly there was $250,000 license fee
for the "BI
Corner" if you wanted to design your own BI board.
That doessn't sound open to me.
I know there was a stiff fee, but I don't think it was quite that high
when we got our BI license in 1988-1989. We ended up using an Augat
"Unilayer" board - we sent Augat our netlist (generated from OrCAD for
DOS and PADS-PCB on an IBM 5170 (PC-AT) IIRC), and they ran wee wires
over the front and back of a pre-fabbed board that was 90% 0.1" holes
and 10% BI Corner. We just had to plug in all the chips and go (the
cheapest source of BIICs at that point was surplus 2MB BI memory
boards from 8200/8300/8250/8350s).
ISTR we calculated it was significantly cheaper to go that route than
to have several dozen 10-layer boards made. I still have a few - we
never sold our our first run.
-ethan
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