>william degnan wrote:
Prior to the DEC Rainbow, Chrislin Industries was marketing the 11/23 with vt103 as a desktop computer. This is a 3rd party vendor. Maybe they were on to something...
Back around 1988, one of my customers had a few VT103 systems with just an RX02 for storage. A 3rd party controller for an MFM drive (ST506 or DEC RD51) was added since the DEC RQDX1 took too much power. There was still sufficient power and room to place the ST506 drive inside at the base of the VT103. Prior to that point, I had a VT103 with just 256 KB of memory and a DSD 880/8 which had an 8 GB hard drive / RX03 floppy drive in an external box. So there were other 3rd party solutions as well. At one point, just to say that I had done so, I placed a quad PDP-11/73 CPU along with 4 MB of memory, an ESDI controller and a DHV11 with 8 serial ports into the backplane of a VT103. I had to power the three 600 MG hard drives from an additional PC power supply since there was insufficient power from the VT103. But that demonstrated that just a 4 x 4 Qbus backplane was sufficient to run an extremely powerful PDP-11 system using the VT103 as a base system with its own console terminal. At one point, I heard that someone even managed to make the first two slots ABCD which allowed a MicroVAX II to be used instead, although a PDP-11/83 with PMI memory would have also been possible or a PDP-11/93 could also have been used and one quad slot would still have been available without the ABCD change to the backplane. These combinations could have been produced by DEC and been years and technology ahead of the PC computer, but that never happened. I have the impression that the VAX was placed in a position of priority and most development on the PDP-11 side which could compete with the 32-bit VAX was restricted even though there were still many applications where a 16-bit system was more than adequate. DEC could have sold millions of VT103 systems. Jerome Fine
