From: "Jay West" <jw...@classiccmp.org>
--------------------
Was it possible to configure an Access system with a mix of a 21MX and 2100?
(I'm not challenging the assertion; it just never occurred to me...)
--------------------
According to the documentation - specifically "no". Both processors must be
the same type.
However, after digging in to it year ago, I see no reason that it shouldn't work and others on the list said they were fairly certain that it did work.

Thanks for the info!

From: Glen Slick <glen.sl...@gmail.com>
The L-Series 2103L and the A-Series A400, A600, A600+, A700, A900,
A990 were all called HP 1000 systems. They maintained software
compatibility with previous generation HP 1000 computers, although the
I/O interfaces used by the L-Series and A-Series were incompatible
with the previous generation HP 1000 computers.

I have a couple of A900 boxes that I need to get RTE-A running on them someday.

I used the A-Series quite a bit in the mid-80's. By that time, the operating system of choice had moved on from RTE-6 to RTE-A, which I quite liked in general. For control applications, it had several nice features for priority control, inter-process communication, etc. It also handled a fully hierarchical file system, which was still not a given at that time. However, I wasn't too pleased with the "full screen editor"; it worked by sending a couple of screen-fulls of text to the terminal (must be an HP26xx), then reading it back off the screen after you'd done any editing locally. It worked better than one might think, but one of the first things I did was write a character-at-a-time editor that used the WordStar / Turbo Pascal key mappings (in Fortran-77, BTW).

With the A600, and at the end the A400, you could get a whole multi-user computer system, including a smallish disk drive (I think up to 60 MB) all in one 6U rack mount chassis, which I thought was pretty neat at the time. I had one, including two terminals, 7912 disk/tape drive, printer, and all the documentation and system generation media (720k floppy disks!) - I got it all for free when a customer upgraded to PCs, but gave it all away to Goodwill when I got married.

On Mon, Jan 16, 2017 at 07:39:00PM -0500, Michael Thompson wrote:
I have two Sun 386i systems. It has an Intel 386 processor and runs SunOS.
Not exactly a big seller for Sun. I met some of the designers at the Vintage
Computer Festival East 2.0 in Burlington, MA.

I had one of those also, courtesy of a friend with a two-digit employee number at Sun. I really enjoyed it, being able to run multiple copies of DOS on a Unix machine in a windowed environment (this was well (this was at least 5 years before Windows 3.0 came out). Apparently the sales force actively *didn't* sell the unit, presumably because the price - and therefore commission - was too low. Gave that one away, too...
~~
Mark Moulding


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