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

[lm@mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy)]

On Tue, Mar 28, 2017 at 02:02:06PM -0400, Brad Spencer wrote:
> Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> writes:
> 
> >> 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.
> 
> 
> I think that the 3/50 was a "single board" VME system... and as you say
> you really couldn't add anything to it.  I will pull one out and get
> some close up shots of the connectors and perhaps the answer can be
> determined by physical inspection.  I also looked at the config file for
> NetBSD for the sun3 and it very much mentions vme all over the place,
> but that may not have applied to the 3/50.  Is it possible that just VME
> connector was used for power and the like... but nothing else??

That actually rings a bell, could be.

I think it was 3/110 that had the same case/bus as the 4/110.  Less sure
about that, I'm not sure I've ever used a 3/110.  Got a lot of miles on
a 4/110, did a ton of UFS work on that machine.