OT: A call to arms (sort of) - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

3 Jul 1999

Well . . . what could possibly be more "open" than the ISA.  It's capable
of
pretty much anything that the PDP-11 could dish out, AND you can get paid
for taking the boards away from a lot of places.  Almost any function you
care to have is available if you don't want to try to improve on what's
available, and the structural components are commonly available.  The same
could, I guess, be said of the VME in the smaller form factors.  In all my
years of hardware scrounging, I've never seen any architecture more prolific
than the ISA, and in that time I've seen maybe a half dozen Q-bus cards for
cheap.  Now, I'm not saying it has be cheap, but you would gather that as
the primary requirement from what most folks seem so spout about in this
forum, e.g. "What??!  A dollar for a 1956 Rolls, in solid gold!  Too much!
I'll offer a nickel . . ."

Dick
-----Original Message-----
From: Chuck McManis &lt;cmcmanis(a)mcmanis.com&gt;
To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
&lt;classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu&gt;
Date: Friday, July 02, 1999 11:49 PM
Subject: Re: OT: A call to arms (sort of)

...
 Well, in my case it was supposed to lead to the
development of a really
open hardware platform.

As for Allison's comment that SPARC is too "high end" I have to disagree.
The SPARC architecture was initally a lot less complicated than the PDP-11
architecture. It is the funky MMUs that get in the way.

--Chuck

At 11:20 PM 7/2/99 -0400, you wrote:
   Does
anybody know where this is supposed to lead? 
Off topic?

William Donzelli
aw288(a)osfn.org 