3 May
2022
3 May
'22
7:28 a.m.
We got in on the W4 from the IBM Federal Systems guy (later dealt out to
Loral, Martin Marietta, and then Lockheed-Martin). I started with
those guy doing a contract job to craft the second nework interface into
Secure Xenix (Jacob Recter I think was responsible for the first) to
provide a secure downgrading system for some government entity.
Then Intel developed the i860- and IBM came up with the Wizard card.
This was only designed to be.a coprocessor card and was done down in
Boca Raton. The fun and games with that one is that we were on early
steppings of the processor chips and spent a lot of time coding around
chip bugs (mostly with regard to interrupts). IBM/Intel had developed
this thing called hostlink that was supposed to be useful, but we
decided to port AIX to it. When IBM Owego came up with the W4, we were
asked to port AIX again to it.
We had one non-functional W4 kicking around for demo purposes that had 4
“delidded” i860 chips in it. I swapped one for an early stepping
(useless) chip and kept one of the delidded ones which I still have in a
box somewhere.