🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <872@gold.GVG.TEK.COM> grege@gold.GVG.TEK.COM (Gregory Ebert) writes:
>	Ok. I'll take some initiative. The first step is to define our
>	systems. Since most of us hackers are on a limited budget, we
>	should concentrate on using as much as we can of what's
>	already out there or in our junk boxes.

Are you familiar with Dave Rand and George Scolaro's pc532?  While
the '532 is an expensive chip set the board otherwise sounds like
fits your needs.  Mail to dlr@daver.bungi.com shoud get you more
info.

>	The hardware aspects should be kept as bare-bones as possible,
>	yet leave provisions for future expansion. Stuff like DMA, 32
>	serial ports, SCSI, etc is nice, but ...

The pc532 has 8 serial ports and SCSI, so I guess it kinda halfway
exceeds your specs.  But you don't have to fully populate the serial
ports if you don't want.  I suppose you could not plug in any SCSI
controllers but sooner or later you'll want a disk ...

>	Thus began my endeavor : to build an expandable 32032 system.

The price tag of the 32032 is certainly an incentive to look at it
over the 32532 if you don't need/want the speed.  You still might
wish to work with the pc532 crowd (maybe call yours a pc032?) so
you can share as many resources as possible, software and hardware
alike.

For software, Minix will definitely be running on the pc532.  It
also seems likely that at least one form of Unix will be available,
perhaps both System V and some BSD or Mach variant.  If your pc032
uses reasonably similar I/O to the pc532 porting either OS should
be fairly easy.

On the hardware front the pc532 has two SCSI busses, one a general
purpose one and the other one providing a high speed synchronous
SCSI bus for disks and tapes.  You might consider including just
the general purpose SCSI, with the same type slots as the pc532
so boards could be shared between the two machines.

>		For the meantime, we will need to get a VERY simple monitor
>	up and running, before anything else can be done.

Bruce Culbertson is providing the monitor for the pc532.  I can't
vouch for its quality as my pc532 is still waiting for a few parts
but it already exists and is available in source form.

I'm willing to spend some extra bucks to get the performance but
there are lots of people who aren't, and it would be quite nice to
have a "family" of machines so the limited resources of each group
could be shared to mutual advantage.

-- 
Karl Swartz			 |UUCP	uunet!apple!zygot!ditka!kls
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