Nubus (was CC-40) - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

19 Feb 2001

At 01:44 PM 2/19/01 -0500, James B. DiGriz wrote:
...
 On Mon, 19 Feb 2001, Cameron Kaiser wrote:

  Hey I've got a CC40, maybe I better start
paying attention. 
 Someone on the Vintage Macs list said that TI invented NuBus. True?

It was originally developed at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science,
around '73 or so, I think. There was a consortium of some kind formed later to
commercialize it, of which TI, Apple, and others were members. The TI
S1500 and Explorer series were NuBus machines. 
I designed a card for Nubus that never made it to market (it was an 
accelerator card for doing OCR) back about 1991 or so.  My recollection was 
also that it came from MIT, TI adopted it, then when the open Macs came out 
they adopted the bus.  Heresay was that at the last minute the standard 
card size was changed because Apple already had worked up a machine and 
somebody got the dimensions wrong by 1/8" or something, so they changed the 
standard rather than retooling their product.

...
 What I'd like to know is how compatible the Mac
NuBus is with the
S1500 implementation. That is, can you take Mac NuBus cards and use them
in an S1500, given Unix drivers for them?... 
One feature that I recall was that was in the standard that Apple ignored 
was that the test and initialization code that came on each card was to be 
written in interpreted FORTH in order to make the cards more portable to 
different machines.

-----
Jim Battle == frustum(a)pacbell.net