On Jan 30, 2024, at 3:25 PM, Bill Degnan via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > > thanks. I suppose that gives me enough idea what time period and use they > had
VMEbus was widely used as a successor to MultiBus in the workstation market, a lot of vendors that started with MultiBus (Sun/SGI for example) switched to VME because they were using 68K anyway and it a supported full 32-bit address and data space, where MultiBus was mostly designed for 8080/8085/8086 (and even 8086 required some extension to support 16-bit data bus width and 20-bit address space). The biggest uses of VMEbus though were in laboratory automation, process control, and robotics, where it was in competition with both MultiBus and DIO[1] (the bus on the HP 9000-200 and 9000-300 series, which were originally designed as successors to the HP 1000/21MX/2100 series). That's why you'll see a lot of analog and digital I/O hardware, computer vision systems, motor controllers, and so on in the VMEbus 3U and 6U form factors. This is also what got VMEbus used in a lot of American defense applications. -- Chris
