[TUHS] Release of 8th, 9th and 10th Editions Unix

Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com
Wed Mar 29 03:42:54 AEST 2017


On Tue, Mar 28, 2017 at 01:00:41PM -0400, Brad Spencer wrote:
> Arthur Krewat <krewat at kilonet.net> writes:
> 
> > Not according to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-3
> >
> > The 3/50 was indeed a "pizza box" according to this, but Brad Spencer's 
> > images 7A and 7B he purports these are 3/50 boards: 
> > http://anduin.eldar.org/~brad/sunstuff/ - and those are definitely VME 
> > form-factor. Although, it's possible it uses only that "custom/private" 
> > third connector on the VME backplane?
> 
> > On 3/28/2017 11:38 AM, Dan Cross wrote:
> >> I *think* the 3/50 had a VME bus. As I recall, it was basically a 
> >> single VME board mounted inside of a pizzabox case.
> 
> My understanding is that the 3/50 is indeed some sort of VME system, as
> is the 4/110, with some address related oddities.  But it has been a
> very long time since I booted a 3/50 up...  The 3/50 I have are in their
> cases, I just opened them up for the pictures.

Hmm, so the 4/110 being VME is for sure correct, I had one of those when
I was at Sun.  The 3/50, I just don't think it was VME.  I believe they
made a version that was a single VME board but so far as I know that was
a different beast.  I could be wrong, I googled a bit and couldn't figure
it out.

What I know for sure is, unlike a 4/110, you couldn't open up the case 
and shove more VME stuff in there.  If the 3/50 was a VME board I'm not
sure what the point was other than, perhaps, to reuse the same part in
a small case.  I can't see Andy doing that, he was super cost sensitive.



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