Writing emulators [Was: Re: VCF PNW 2018: Pictures!]

[Chris Elmquist]

> On Feb 21, 2018, at 3:52 PM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
>> On 02/21/2018 12:28 PM, Al Kossow via cctalk wrote:
>> That actually just came up for discussion in a donation review meeting this week at
>> CHM.
>> 
>> I don't know if they're that interesting w/o the software and documentation, and even
>> then, these things were all locked down with licenses, except for the really early ones
>> like Daisy and Valid.
>> 
>>> On 2/21/18 11:37 AM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
>>> 
>>> Speaking of emulation, does anyone here collect old ZyCAD or Cadence
>>> hardware emulation rigs?
> 
> Definitely lots of proprietary stuff.  I had a couple of friends who
> worked for ZyCAD back in the day.  I got the impression that they were
> only exposed to a piece of the puzzle.
> 
> Also, expensive as hell.
> 
> --Chuck

We had a lot of ZyCAD stuff at ETA because we just had to drive a couple miles up the road to get it ;-)  Lots of the ETA brass were buddies with the ZyCAD brass because they all came from ADL.

We used it to simulate the ALSI 20K gate arrays before they were built.  The gear we had was usually plugged into some Apollo headless nodes, which I think were Multibus backplanes?? and then accessed over the Domain network.

Chris