On 04/20/2016 10:00 AM, Toby Thain wrote:
On 2016-04-20 10:27 AM, Pete Turnbull wrote:
On 20/04/2016 14:57, Toby Thain wrote:
I'm changing the subject because the subject of RISC
coprocessor boards
has already been interesting to me; I owned the NuBus
Levco Translink II
(for Mac II family) with four TRAM slots for transputers.
Also going to mention the BBC Tube coprocessor here.
Which had an ARM
version, iirc.
It did indeed - I have one. Also a couple of 6502
CoPros, a 65C102, a
32016 and a pair of Z80s, which were nice in their day.
Nice collection. I'd forgotten about the 32016! What
software ran on these respective processors?
I got a group at work to buy a Logical Microcomputer Co.
32016-based system, it originally came with GENIX, I think.
They later changed to XENIX. (I may have the order of those
backwards.)
I cloned the whole system on wire-wrap boards, and it
actually WORKED!
My memory was probably a bit slow, and the system was a
DOG!!! I was also not a Unix guru, by any means, so a lot
of stuff was painful. But, compared to my Z-80/S-100
system, it was so slow as to be a real pain in the neck.
So, there were several versions of Unix derivatives for the
32016 family. Nat Semi also had cross compilers that ran on
the VAX and would compile C, FORTRAN, Pascal and assembly
source into binary that you could download onto their
development boards. We built a multiprocessor system that
added on to a VAX 11/780. But, it was too cumbersome for
our physicists to go through all that hassle, and we had no
debugging facility in that attached processor mode. (I
could have hacked some kind of error message queue to the
system.)
Jon
Jon
