Raspberry Pi for vaxen turbochannel

Greg Stark stark at mit.edu
Fri Apr 5 18:08:31 CDT 2019


I've had a plan to set up a raspberry Pi as the mopd and NFS server to bit
my vaxstation for a while. To be a self contained demo I could probably fit
it inside the vaxstation.

One of the annoyances is that it would need another power cord and need a
place to mount it inside.

It occurs to me that the turbochannel slots have 4A each. It would be
entirely possible to print a whole open source board like the raspberry Pi
(or banana Pi, etc) on a turbochannel card and kill two birds with one
stone.

It would give a nice solid place to mount the pi with access to the ports
on the back and power supplied by the vaxstation.

Is this something that would be of interest to anyone other than me?


On Fri 21 Dec 2018, 22:09 Zane Healy via cctalk, <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
wrote:

>
> > On Dec 21, 2018, at 5:20 PM, Grant Taylor via cctalk <
> cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> >
> > On 12/21/18 3:30 PM, Zane Healy via cctalk wrote:
> >> I’m afraid I’ll have to agree with Jim here.  When talking about Retro
> Gaming, in most cases, the Raspberry Pi, while better than nothing, aren’t
> as good as the real thing, especially in regards to video and audio.
> >
> > There's nothing to be afraid of.
> >
> > I was asking from a position of ignorance because I've not used either.
> I have some colleagues at work that use the Raspberry Pi.  So I know of,
> but not about, it.
>
> The Raspberry Pi’s are a pretty impressive little tool for situations
> where they have enough resources.  For the purpose of emulation, they’re a
> great platform.  The problem is less with the Raspberry Pi, and more with
> emulation as a whole.  In other words, this is a software issue, not a
> hardware issue.
>
> >> Now despite what I just said about the Raspberry Pi, I have three of
> them around here, one is a small VAX running OpenVMS 7.3, one is a DPS-8
> running Multics, and the other a KL-10B running TOPS-20.  I had dreams of
> building a VMS cluster of RPi 3+’s, but have kind of gone off that idea,
> due to the superior performance I get using my VMware Cluster to host VAX
> instances.
> >
> > I'll have to check out the DPS-8 and KL-10B.
>
> For the PDP-10, my favorite is KLH10.
> http://www.avanthar.com/healyzh/decemulation/pdp10emu.html
>
> For the DPS-8, there really is only one option, and sadly GCOS-8 isn’t
> available, only Multics.  Still it’s pretty cool to finally be able to use
> Multics, and it’s a lot more user friendly than GCOS-8 (I used to be a
> Systems Analyst at a DPS-8 mainframe site).
> http://www.avanthar.com/healyzh/decemulation/Honeywell_DPS-8.html
>
> For those unaware, my DEC Emulation pages had to move late last year, due
> to my ISP of ~20 years being ransacked by a Crook.  I managed to do quite a
> bit of work updating the pages earlier this year.
>
> Zane
>
>
>


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