Re: [TUHS] ATT Hardware

["Seth J. Morabito" <web@loomcom.com>]

ron@ronnatalie.com writes:

> The recent reference to the Dennis's comments on ATT chip production had me
> feeling nostalgic to the 3B line of computers.
> [...]

Oh I love hearing anecdotes about AT&T hardware. It should go without
saying that the 3B2, even with all its horrible flaws, is pretty special
to my heart, given all the effort I put into emulating it! I've learned
to really like the WE32000 architecture. It's just so well suited for
UNIX and C. It's a pity the clock speed was so slow, and that the
3B2/310 and 3B2/400 were so limited in memory. A 4MB maximum was not a
lot for a serious multi-user machine, even for 1985.

But, I have absolutely no experience with the 3B5 and 3B20. I would love
to hear more about them from those of you with experience. Were they
ever a marketing success? (And here, by marketing success, I mean as a
general purpose UNIX computer, not as a telephone switch)

Emulating a 3B5 or 3B20 would be fun, but I've seen even less internals
documentation about them than I have about the 3B2, so I fear it's a
hopeless task.

-Seth
--
Seth Morabito
https://loomcom.com/
web@loomcom.com