Front Panel Update

[COURYHOUSE at aol.com]

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