On Wed, Jan 15, 2020 at 11:47 AM Noel Chiappa <jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
Wow! WD created the QBUS? Fascinating. I wonder if DEC made any changes to the
QBUS between the original demo WD boards and the first DEC ones?
I can not say I know and I would suspect they peed on it in some manner, that was the DEC culture.  I've just sent a note to Mr. BI to see if he knows and I'll pass back anything I learn if I do.  Sounds like the sort of thing they might have gotten changed before it was release.


 
Are there any documents about the WD original still extant, do you know?
I'm pretty sure we had some stuff from WD at CMU, because CM* was made out of a lot of them, and CMU did custom microcode so they could talk to the capabilities and K.map HW.  I remember seeing some prints with WD markings on it, but I was not heavily involved other than working the new distributed front-end which we did with LSI-11s. 

Somebody from the CMU HW lab like Jim Teter might know, although he did the 11/40e for C.mmp, I'm not sure who was the microcode guru on CM*  as that was all happening as I was leaving.  I sent a couple of emails to folks like Danny Klein, Mike Liebensberger, and Tron McConnell. Danny and Mike are SW folks, Tron was a EE/HW type but mostly worked on other stuff at Mellon Institute in those days.    But, IIRC, Tron was worked on a 3Mbit Xerox board for the LSIs, so he might have had something.   We all did some stuff with CM* (Mike more than any of us). FWIW: Tron was (is) a bit of packrat and if he ever had anything like that, he might still have it.