jnelson@tle.dec.com (07/24/88)
I am affiliated with a research group at my university which is trying to learn as much as possible about the architecture of the AT&T 3B2/400 systems. Our ultimate goal is to write a distributed operating system which will run on the 3B2. We have purchased manuals on the WE* 32100 CPU and WE 32101 MMU; we also have the 3B2 Technical Reference Manual. Unfortunately, these manuals tend to leave a lot of questions unanswered. My group is very interested in obtaining detailed technical specifications (source code is preferred and MOST appreciated!) on the following aspects of the 3B2: o the boot sequence. The 3B2 Technical Reference Manual only shows a "flowchart" diagram and is nowhere near the level of detail my group requires. o device drivers. None of the manuals we have describe device drivers. AT&T has discontinued their 3B2 Device Driver manual, and as far as we know, has not published a replacement. o distributed operating systems. Except for UNIX, we know of no other operating system which runs on the 3B2 architecture. We are most interested in communicating with anyone who has succesfully implemented an operating system on the 3B2 architecture with whom we can trade experiences and suggestions. Please send your comments, suggestions and source code (!) to the one of the university addresses below. We are willing to negotiate licence agreements to protect propriatary and confidential information. If requested, I will post a followup status report to the newsgroup. Thanks in advance for your assistance. * WE is a trademark of AT&T. Jeff E. Nelson -------------- Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University INTERNET: jen@vtcs1.cs.vt.edu BITNET: jen@vtcs1.bitnet (Please send your responses to one of the ABOVE addresses) Digital Equipment Corporation INTERNET: jnelson%tle.dec@decwrl.dec.com (Please do NOT send responses to this address) Affiliations given for identification purposes only. Opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University nor Digital Equipment Corporation.