[TUHS] WE321 3B/VME boar (Re: Whither Workstations? (Was Re: Demise of AT&T))

[Greg A. Woods]

At Sat, 24 May 2025 09:32:26 +0000, segaloco via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
Subject: [TUHS] Re: Whither Workstations? (Was Re: Demise of AT&T)
>
> The WE321SB seemed to be largely marketed towards systems folks rather
> than as a standalone VME solution.  You wouldn't get a 321 card for
> day to day operations but you would get a 321 card to throw in your
> VME crate and prototype stuff to get added to a 3B system of some
> kind.  Peripheral dev, driver dev, that sort of thing.  Again though I
> wasn't there but that's the gist I've gotten from various studies over
> the years.

I'm no expert but I don't think anyone would use the VME WE321 series
for prototyping anything targeted at AT&T 3B systems (other than maybe
applications software, but 3B2s were much cheaper and easier to manage
than a VME machine unless you already had a ton of spare VME boxes).

The smaller 3B2s (/300, /400, /500, /600, /700, /1000) were all very
PC-like motherboards with an I/O expansion bus that accommodated
"feature" cards, but that was not a VME bus.  There was a design manual
that would have allowed third parties to develop I/O boards for the
3B2s, but I'm not sure any third-party boards were ever produced.  (The
bigger systems also included expansion slots for more memory, cache, and
other things, but those were, I believe, entirely proprietary slots.)

VME was more suited, then and perhaps still, for industrial and
communications control systems where VME was already in use, but perhaps
with a different CPU.  There was a companion manual for the WE321 cards
to help users develop UNIX System V drivers for other VME devices.  I
think it was basically AT&T's attempt to sell UNIX into the VME market
directly (instead of relying on third parties to do it independently),
and because it was ABI-compatible with the 3B line it gave ISVs access
to a rather vast amount of commercial software that was already ported
to 3Bs.

--
					Greg A. Woods <gwoods at acm.org>

Kelowna, BC     +1 250 762-7675           RoboHack <woods at robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods at planix.com>     Avoncote Farms <woods at avoncote.ca>
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