out-of-mainstream minis

[mark at markesystems.com]

OP (about the 68000 box) here – thanks for all the informative comments!

I did spend some time using the 68010-based Apollo workstations, and as I understood it they were equipped with two processors, one shadowing the other, because not enough information was saved to completely restart an instruction – particularly a block transfer – if a memory paging operation was required.  Apparently the 68020 somehow fixed this problem.  (The 68008, BTW, was just a 68000 with limited address space and an 8-bit data bus.  It was primarily targeted at deeply embedded systems, not “general purpose computing” applications.)

Thanks for the clarification about V7 Unix not requiring demand paging; this makes complete sense, since it was never mentioned in any of the documentation I read.  And yes, it it was Unix V7, not “System 7” (sorry, it was a while ago...).

Thanks for the pointer to the Convergent Technologies boxes.  This wasn’t them (the case was different: it was black, and horizontal-profile), but the functionality looks very similar; they could easily have had the same motherboard or other guts.  Also, I forgot to mention in my original post that there was a 5-1/4” floppy on this thing, too.
~~
Mark Moulding