Finding developer docs for VME hardware?

[Warner Losh]

Most of the VME gear pre-dates folks putting it online on their web
sites. This means that what exists is on paper and since there was
never the fanatical devotion to preservation like the pdp-11 gear in
that community, most of it is gone to the landfill. Plus DEC's
documentation is way better than any of the docs of the boards I've
ever looked at....

Warner

On Sat, Sep 10, 2016 at 11:33 PM, Chris Hanson
<cmhanson at eschatologist.net> wrote:
> No worries, I expected that I'd need to find the manufacturers docs. I was hoping though that someone would have a repository or something, like Bitsavers...
>
>   -- Chris
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
>> On Sep 10, 2016, at 2:28 PM, Mark Linimon <linimon at lonesome.com> wrote:
>>
>> You just had to go by each manufacturer's documentation.  I can say
>> this with some authority, as I wrote some of said documentation during
>> my several years at Mizar :-)
>>
>> There is the spec, of course, but that only tells you what each board
>> must implement so it can talk to the others across the backplane.
>>
>> Many VMEbus installations may not have even run an OS, just an event loop.
>> If you ran pDOS or OS/9 or vxWorks (my own specialty at the time), you
>> had to either get a driver from the manufacturer or write your own.
>>
>> Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
>>
>> mcl