From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: imp@bsdimp.com (Warner Losh) Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2017 21:17:34 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] Release of 8th, 9th and 10th Editions Unix In-Reply-To: <58db807d.qn8Xmvl3ZuN+bN3u%schily@schily.net> References: <201703290822.v2T8Mv1c009720@farg.inf.ed.ac.uk> <58db807d.qn8Xmvl3ZuN+bN3u%schily@schily.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Mar 29, 2017 at 3:38 AM, Joerg Schilling wrote: > George Ross wrote: > >> > I think that the 3/50 was a "single board" VME system... and as you say >> > you really couldn't add anything to it. >> >> IIRC the only way to add anything to it was to pull the processor from its >> socket, plug in a daughterboard, and then plug the processor back into that. >> It did feel a whole lot more responsive with that extra 8MB of memory! > > The method to "upgrade" a Sun-3/50 was to pull the gate arrays and add a > doughter board. There have been such extensions from "Sunflower". A company > that was latrer forced by Sun to rename into "Solflower". I know people that did unnatural things to upgrade the Sun 3/50 to something that had enough memory not to suck. Oh, and to have real disks, rather than the crazy SCSI to ESDI disks that had performance only marginally better than floppy drives.... IIRC, the hard part was getting a VME "cage" to allow other cards to in inserted, which killed the pizza-box implementation of the 3/50. But it's been a long time since that happened, and maybe I'm misremembering. Maybe that was only possible with the 3/60. Warner