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

[Boyanich, Alastair]

G'day Dave,

  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. 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". 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.

I only really remember it because AT&T stuff was around '93/94 pretty
unique here in Australia. At the time I was pretty obsessed with
HP/Apollo and SGI kit.

Al.