Unisys absorbed Varian mini computers ie the V 77 nice chart in this pdf of the family tree http://rmarsh.cs.und.edu/CLASS/CS451/HANDOUTS/os-unisys.pdf by the way the purchase agreement was dated 1977 between Uni and Var we have lots of manuals in the catacombs.... unisys/varian/burroughs Ed# _www.smecc.org_ (http://www.smecc.org) In a message dated 6/9/2015 3:45:11 P.M. US Mountain Standard Time, paulkon...@comcast.net writes:
> On Jun 9, 2015, at 5:58 PM, tony duell <a...@p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote: > > >> WTF? Varian was a competitor of DEC. They made minis themselves. Sounds >> extremely strange that one would take a DEC mini, and put a Varian badge >> on it. Did someone try to make a joke? > > I will always think of Varian as a maker of (very high quality) vacuum equipment. > > I am sure this was not a joke. It wasn't just the name, the switch handles were all green, the silkscreening > was different, etc. It was a normal PDP8/e inside, though. It was part of a piece of lab equipment (I forget > what) and I had to do a minor repair on the PDP8/e side (this was over 20 years ago...). I was pleased to > see that apart from a custom interface board, the rest of it was standard DEC boards, so the printsets I > had applied. Interesting. Varian is a microwave equipment company; I have one of their TWTs sitting on my H960 at home. Vacuum equipment, I could believe that. But yes, Varian made a 16 bit minicomputer; I had a handbook for it at one time (now lost, I suspect). And if memory serves, the reason is that there was one in the Computer Science department at the University of Illinois where I studied. I remember nothing about the architecture, other than the fact it supported user microprogramming. Possibly the OEM PDP8 predates that device. Or possibly it wasn’t enough of a competitor for DEC to stop doing OEM business with Varian. paul
