[TUHS] C from 1980 binaries

[segaloco via TUHS]

On Wednesday, November 4th, 2026 at 12:20, Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM) via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

> > The fact that, a few years later, Ken O'Mohundro put a 68010
> > on a QBUS fairly easily is living proof it wasn't that far off.
> 
> Was this the precursor to the NBI 68010 QBUS Unix system (I forget
> the marketing model name or number).
> 
> I owned on of those at home back in the day[1], complete with
> 10 Mb/s ethernet board and a DH-11.  It ran an off-the-tape
> compilation of 4.2 BSD, and it was absolutely covinced it was
> a VAX :-)
> 
> I was running a small usenet hub on it, and when I connected the
> Telebit, the machine started to panic in the DH11 driver under 9600+
> baud serial load when there was also any ethernet traffic present.
> I called a friend and said "please send me dh11.c and .h from the
> 4.2 release tape."  Compiling them required changing a single #define
> (compile for QBUS, not UNIBUS).  I re-linked the kernel, rebooted,
> and the problem vanished!
> 
> Oh how I miss that machine.  It was like I had a VAX in the 2nd
> bedroom, but with a proper CPU :-)
> 
> --lyndon
> 
> [1] I first ran into one circa 1987 at a lawyer's office.  I
>     acquired mine in 1991.
> 

All this UNIBUS/QBUS talk has me wondering, what with the clear
influence of the PDP-11 on the M68000, was there also a line connecting
VERSAbus and later VMEbus back to the DEC tradition of system buses?

For the record, some of the early non-DEC System V targets are M68K
systems based on VERSA and VME bus systems.  VME then goes onto feature
in numerous other UNIX targets, among them the WE321SB single board and
Sun machines.

- Matt G.