Applikon Workstation?

[Sean Caron]

The name sounds familiar ... not sure why ... it turns out they had their
main offices here in Ann Arbor, MI at some point, as an aside.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applicon

Best,

Sean


On Tue, Aug 25, 2015 at 5:02 PM, Holm Tiffe <holm at freibergnet.de> wrote:

> In the nineties I've workes as electronican and system administrator at the
> institue of geophyics at our local University of Mining and Technology here
> in Freiberg Germany.
> Some day I've got a call from Motorola in Munich, they wanted to get rid of
> some old computers and asked if we had some use for them, I've sayed yes.
>
> As far as I know we got 3 Computers, one was an 68000 Unix system from
> philips, some kind of Microcomputer development system for 8080 or 8085,
> I've got the system running but since there wasn't much software on the
> disk we had not much use for this thing. The disk was alsready dying and
> lived not that long.
> The next thing was a desktop VME System from Motorola, IMHO equipped with
> an 68010, some MMUs, an color Monitor ad Harddisk and Floppy.. it run some
> kind of VDOS (or so) .. or VME-DOS or soemthing.., I remember that we had
> some
> documentiation for it and I've reinstalled that VDOS.. but not much use for
> that thing also.
>
> The 3rd Computer was the most interestng one. That thing was labeled
> "Applikon Workstation" (as far as I remember, may be Applicon..).
> That was some kind of a microvax made by Schlumberger.
> It had an CPU that sat in a QBUS Backplane and a QBUS to UNIBUS Bridge.
> The CPU was only a double sized board (!), an Emulex UC07 conected the disk
> to the machine and so far as I remember there was some kind of graphics
> board on the unibus side. I've repaired the CPU Board by changing the
> RSA232 Drivers for the console and the beast came to live. I've fiddeled
> around with the TK50 Tapes containing VMS4.6 (if my memory not fails) but
> could'nt get warm with VMS... Installed NetBSD and failed.
> NetBSD was'nt booting from the SCSI Drives with the Emulex, someone sent
> me an UDA50 and I was able to install and boot NetBSD, but had to key in
> the loader at the chevron every time I had to boot..
> I've sent the Emulex to Ragge for diagnostics and never got it back.
> The Machine ran for years as ftp server at the institute until I've pulled
> the plug. Have never seen a picture from that graphics board.
> I've leaved the University in 1989, the machine sat on the garret of the
> building to this time, I'm pretty sure it's long gone...
>
>
> Now I'm fiddeling with VAXen again and that old thing came to mind, looked
> with google but could'nt find a machine like this, not even a Microvax with
> a only doubles sized CPU Board like an KDF-11.
>
> The question now is...is someone knowing of a beast like this?
>
> Regards,
>
> Holm
>
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