On Fri, 2007-12-07 at 13:56 -0500, James Knott wrote:
Hans Witvliet wrote:
On Fri, 2007-12-07 at 12:59 -0500, James Knott wrote:
The Data General Eclipse line had a feature called "Writable Control Store", which could be used to add custom instructions to the CPU. The VAX 11/780 had it's microcode loaded from floppy at boot, but I don't recall if it was changeable in the same manner as the Eclipse WCS.
Floppy? It was a real huge 8" flop ... (still have them here)
hw
Yep. There was an LSI-11 (microprocessor version of PDP-11) hidden in the cabinet, equipped with one or two 8", hard sectored drives. It was also used to connect the console terminal. As I recall, the command to use it as the VAX console was "STP" and Ctl-Z(?) to return to the LSI-11 console. Back in it's day, the VAX was considered a "super mini", a real hot system. But it only had the CPU power of a 386!
BTW, that's where I first came across the "Adventure" game. :-)
I remember that we opened one of those floppies, and perforated the media several times, put it back in, and gave the damaged media to one of the newbies around at that time, Explaining, "well didn't the system complained about missing sectors..." -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org