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. :-
Several years ago I was given an Xerox floppy drive with a box of 8" floppies. Many "commercial" programs. Unfortunately I didn't get the computer that went with them. The lady that owned it had already given that to a school for challenged children to hammer on. *<[:o( -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org