Standard Engineering CAMAC crate controller with LSI-11

[Dave Wade]

Much to my surprise, there are CAMAC Crates and memory cards on E-Bay. How you would use this I don't know. When I worked at NERC we used them for many many tasks.
We had a Honeywell L66 running GCOS3. We used these to emulate Honeywell RNP707s. These were like 3780's so remote work terminals, printers, punches, readers etc.
Some of these were just local to the Honeywell and others were remote......

.. we also build 3780 HASP type workstations, with remote screens as well for access to IBM kit elsewhere. Then we had media conversion systems which for example we used to read tapes from the various experiments they carried out and copy the data to normal 9-track tape.....

Some systems had Unibus PDP/11's. Others had Q-Bus systems. The software was built on an IBM mainframe using a PDP-11 cross assembler and we had libraries to handle the CAMAC modules. Some systems had PROM loaded cards, others we loaded from Paper Tape. Some of the software wasn't reliable so we had to re-boot often

Dave

> -----Original Message-----
> From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> On Behalf Of Jon Elson via
> cctalk
> Sent: 01 October 2019 03:39
> To: Adrian Stoness <tdk.knight at gmail.com>; General at ezwind.net;
> Discussion at ezwind.net:On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
> Subject: Re: Standard Engineering CAMAC crate controller with LSI-11
> 
> On 09/30/2019 09:17 PM, Adrian Stoness via cctalk wrote:
> > just a box of boards or a system missing a memoru module?
> >
> OK, if you are not familiar with it, CAMAC is a standard for data acquisition and
> control, that has 25-slot powered crates.  At the right edge, the last 2 slots are
> dedicated as controller slots.
> This was a 3-slot set that could be used as a programmable controller for the
> CAMAC crate.
> So, it has 3 CAMAC modules, one of which has the LSI11/2 in it.
> But, since the LSI11/2 doesn't have memory on board, and the other boards
> don't seem to have any memory, it seems something is missing.  I think there
> must have been a 4th module that communicated by a ribbon cable across the
> front.  It may still be around here...
> 
> Jon