[SunRescue] any 3B2 users out there?

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Tuesday, March 20, 2001 at 22:35:17 (EST), dave at cca.org wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [SunRescue] any 3B2 users out there?
>
> Were there any 3B2 IO boards that *didn't* have an onboard 186? I've
> never seen one. (I've only dealt with the 300 and 400.)

Hmmm.... I don't know.  Indeed I've never seen one without an onboard
i186 either, but then I've only have the SCSI board (HA), PORTS, EPORTS,
Ethernet (NI), and the QIC cartridge tape controller (CTC).

The 3B2 Maintenance Ref. Man. also mentions an Intelligent Serial
Controller (ISC) [synchronous serial, I think], Expansion Disk
Controller (XDC) [ST506 MFM], a Network Access Unit (NAU) [for Starlan],
and the infamous Alarm Interface Circuit (AIC).

The drawing of the AIC doesn't seem to include an 80186, at least not in
the packaging AT&T usually used, nor does the XDC.

> One would think that given DMA & an 186 on every IO board, performance 
> would be killer, but I have heard that the 186s spent most of their time
> working around hardware bugs. Do you know if there's any truth to that?

That I don't know.  I do know that the EPORTS board actually performed
right to its specs, and was pretty impressive at the time.

> How do the free unixes deal with downloaded "firmware" to boards on
> microchannel machines? Do they just use the original files or have
> free versions of any of that code actually been written?

I don't know that either....

I do know that on some Adaptec SCSI boards the code has sometimes been
rewritten....

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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