On 12/14/16 12:56 AM, Holm Tiffe wrote:
> As far as I understood, you now have found the AM2901 BitSlices in your > machine? yes > It where intersting to know in which order the boards in your system are > placed. > Unfortunately, the boards were separated from the chassis years ago, and after a couple of days of searching I can't find the chassis. I really hope it didn't get tossed in a purge last summer. I found some bits of code on the net (mgdev.h in the BRL-CAD package) that describe the instruction set, and a couple of people I need to try to try contacting to see if they still have any documentation. There were drivers around for V6 Unix, Purdue, MIT, UPenn and several other places wrote their own packages it seems for it http://www.psych.upenn.edu/~saul/MAN3rev https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/45177/08509887-MIT.pdf https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/45178/09961685-MIT.pdf I have the Purdue library on a DECtape image that I'll need to extract the files from. If you can look at the backplane, can you tell me if it is just bussed straight across? It really seems like there were over the top card connectors for the peripheral bus and just a bus arragement on the backplane. It is a very modular system. In the case of the vector version, a minimum configuration was the unibus interface, processor, memory, and vector generator cards. I think your unit was raster, so there was an intermediate vector to raster converter, and frame buffer that took the display list memory and rasterized it. My unit has additional cards (rotate, light pen, keyboard/peripheral interface cards) This all makes a lot more sense once I was able to find some brochures in the CHM collection yesterday that hadn't been cataloged until recently. Another rathole :-(
