3B1s and "old school" UNIX, was Re: [HECnet] US Seller with some interesting stuff

[Dave McGuire]

On 11/28/2012 04:20 PM, Boyanich, Alastair wrote:
  The "UNIX PC" is the 7300, which is nearly identical to the 3B1.
The
3B1 has a slightly larger top cover to accommodate a full-height hard
drive, while the 7300 will only hold a half-height drive.

  They are otherwise identical, using 68010s.

Okay. I've seen one of the 68010 jobs and repaired the psu for a friend
in the early 90's with a discard he'd taken home from work.   It's all
pretty vague as this was about 1993, 1994.

  I'd sure like to know more about the "proprietary cpu" version
you're
talking about.

Same guy had some "other" VME (Might not've been.. was rack mount and
telco power) AT&T gear at work that I saw a couple of times.

  There was at least one VME-based WE32K processor, but most (all?) of
the 3B line (which does NOT include the 3B1) was very much "its own thing".

Moved a
couple of bin's off the system and tried to get it running on the m68k
system he had at home which didn't work. We were pretty in the dark
about these things and doco was scarce and assumed that "AT&T meant they
were compatible".

  Not even close. ;)   AT&T built computers with a dozen different
processors...if not more...over several decades.   AT&T is a BIG company.

The idea behind the home machine was a learning
exercise, fiddle system for home. Old guy that managed a lot of the
esoteric stuff at his work said when we questioned the incompatibility
said "of course not. It's older than the m68k workstation, and it's all
micro-coded off bit-sliced CPU's". Maybe it wasn't? Either way, the rack
stuff's binaries were not runnable on the SysV r3.5 m68k jobs.

  It was probably 3B2-family WE32K stuff.   Not bit-slice though.

                                -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA