[rescue] Sun 3/80 Schematics

[Bill D]

Hi Chris,

Appreciate the suggestion.  Do you have any pointers to available VME stuff
along these lines I could look at?  Of course I would prefer to use SunOS,
but older versions of NetBSD are also perfectly acceptable as well.  Some
time ago I thought about picking up an old Amiga and upgrading the CPU on
it to a 68060 and then running NetBSD, but the Amiga collectors are bidding
up the prices on them to more than I'm willing to pay for a vintage
computer put together as cheaply as was feasible at the time.

- Bill

On Tue, Oct 15, 2019 at 11:45 PM Chris Hanson <cmhanson at eschatologist.net>
wrote:

> o;?Thatb s actually why I suggested the VME stuff: Itb s about the same
> level of complexity, and cost, but modular and fairly hackable.
>
> For example you can get a CPU card with RAM, serial, parallel, SCSI,
> Ethernet,
> and flash for around US$100, throw it on a small backplane, attach a
> transition board to expose the I/O, and go.
>
> Or you can find a CPU card with less I/O that doesnb t need a transition
> board, and use separate inexpensive SCSI & Ethernet cards. Itb s basically
> the same as one of the non-all-in-one Sun-3 systems, you can tailor it to
> your
> liking.
>
> As an example, I just ordered a random cheap graphics/keyboard/mouse card
> to
> use with my 68040 and 88110 CPU cards. Since itb s VME there were
> programming
> docs written (and Ib ve been able to find them), so I expect to not have
> much
> difficulty bringing it up with wscons on NetBSD and OpenBSD.
>
> (And speaking of tractable software, Ib ve found the BSDs quite easy to
> hack
> around in.)
>
>  b  Chris