loeliger@bach.convex.com (Jon Loeliger) (04/30/91)
OK, sports fans! As promised, here is the summary of those that appear to be interested in obtaining an ET532 in some form or another. In an effort to clear up a statement I made earlier that seems to have caused minor confusion, let me parse it for you. I said: > Perhaps now that so many boards are up an running, people are > more interested in newer boards like the ET532. I know of 3 > that are NOT (Dave or George): Randy Hyde, Rick Rodman and I meant to say two things: I know of 3 interested parties. And, none of those three parties are Dave/George; they are 3 *other* people -- Randy, Rick and someone else... As I see it, there are between 11 and 15 interested parties. If we include Dave and/or George there may be more. If I have bad information in this list, let me know... If you suddenly decide you're interested, still drop me a note at loeliger@convex.com. Most people said $200 would be acceptable and $300 was pushing the upper bound of willingness. Some were still willing at $300. If you want the gory details of what they all said, I can post/send that too. Still, no one has claimed they are more willing than I to do a kit... Speak up, no need to be bashful... jdl Those Who Claim To Be In or Who Are Claimed To Be In --------------------------------------------------------- rhyde@ucrmath.ucr.edu randy hyde rickr@Sun.COM Rick Rodman tom@lajax.pp.fi Tom Javen 3 * jkh@meepmeep.pcs.com Jordan K. Hubbard sverre@lars.Seri.GOV Sverre Froyen nomad@watson.ibm.com Lee 'nomad' Damon marcb@eyrie.img.uu.oz.au Marc A. Boschma 2? * jvh@laureline.hut.fi Johannes Helander jonb@vector.dallas.tx.us Jon Buller loeliger@convex.com Jon Loeliger antsu@sandra.pp.fi Those Who Claim To Be Out --------------------------------------------------------- manatee!johnc@uunet.UU.NET John Connin Those That Waffle --------------------------------------------------------- Everyone else
ian@sibyl.eleceng.ua.oz.au (05/01/91)
Jon Loeliger writes: > Those Who Claim To Be In or Who Are Claimed To Be In > --------------------------------------------------------- . . . You forgot me, although you wouldn't have found out I was interested from watching the list. I told George I was interested *ages* ago when he asked for expressions of interest. At that stage there wasn't enough interest but George might still have the list. Anyway, you can add me to your list for a definite 1 (and I might get more in subsequent runs). If you are willing to kit parts, I am more than willing to take advantage of the offer. However, I can see that their might be more variation in what people want than there was with the pc532. A lot of people, (me included) wouldn't want all those serial lines. Also, there is the question of a GX32 vs 532 cpu. The GX should have all that is required for a peripheral board (and at least in Australia is priced a *lot* cheaper) but people wanting to do multiprocessing will want to run a real operating system which will require a mmu. Which brings us to software. The board needs to have enough smarts in rom to down load code over the SCSI interface. That doesn't seem too hard the pc532 monitor nearly has that. It is possible to do all the code in a stand alone fashion, but it would be easier with some sort of mini-os. Any one know of a suitable os which doesn't need a mmu? Ian Dall
news@bungi.com.mu.edu (05/01/91)
I still have my development materials for the standalone FORTH (ugh) OS I wrote some years ago for the CompuPro 32016 system. This is still something I want to use in the pc532 EPROM. Further stimulation for this project comes from seeing what can be done standalone with the SPARC monitor FORTH system I use here and I like it. -- J.R. (Use the Source, Luke) Stoner asgard@montana.portal.com "Dying is easy - comedy is hard."
rhyde@ucrmath.ucr.edu (randy hyde) (05/02/91)
I'm not convinced you need an MMU for parallel processing. If the board only supports 4 megs (you can't expand it to 16, right?) I couldn't imagine putting more than one process on it at a time anyway. As for the 16 serial ports.... I don't need them. I probably wouldn't buy the parts for them. My "ideal" eth532 would have ethernet, appletalk, and a second SCSI port. But I can live with the existing design. Maybe if George or Dave would bring the bus out to a header (!) so some of us could build our own adapters. As for the initial startup costs: Might I suggest a scheme to lower the costs somewhat. Why not do the same thing you did on the initial run of PC532s? Convince National to sample the 32gx532 parts on the first run? This would more than offset the extra cost of the board. People could buy them now and get the chip for free or buy them later and have to scrounge the chip themselves. National, if they supplied a few free samples now, could get additional sales later on when other boards sold, not to mention all these engineers gaining experience with their chips :-). *** RAndy Hyde
newton@ils.nwu.edu (David Newton) (05/03/91)
In article <14107@ucrmath.ucr.edu>, rhyde@ucrmath.ucr.edu (randy hyde) writes: > I'm not convinced you need an MMU for parallel processing. If the board > only supports 4 megs (you can't expand it to 16, right?) I couldn't > imagine putting more than one process on it at a time anyway. if you're running Minix on it, this might be. Seems to me that there's no reason you couldn't run a different OS on it though. The 6809 does fine multitasking with OS/9. 'course, who wants to write it? (Well, i do, but I don't know enough about OS/9 yet.) -- David L. Newton | Work: (708) 467-1015 | newton@ils.nwu.edu ILS, Room 135 | Home: (708) 332-2321 |------------------------------- 1890 Maple St. |-Gumby Cyberdeck Jockey-| Kicked out of alt.hackers by Evanston, IL 60201 |__Dr. Seuss is a god.___| "Real Hackers." Oh WOE is me.
dlr@daver.bungi.com (Dave Rand) (05/03/91)
[In the message entitled "Re: ET532 summary so far" on May 1, 22:55, randy hyde writes:] > As for the initial startup costs: Might I suggest a scheme to lower > the costs somewhat. Why not do the same thing you did on the initial > run of PC532s? Convince National to sample the 32gx532 parts on the > first run? This would more than offset the extra cost of the board. > People could buy them now and get the chip for free or buy them later and > have to scrounge the chip themselves. > National, if they supplied a few free samples now, could get additional > sales later on when other boards sold, not to mention all these engineers > gaining experience with their chips :-). The GX32's are around $100 in low volume. Getting them for nothing will not significantly improve the $550 board cost. The OCART chips are $22 each (each one does 8 channels). The ROM is $3. The RAM is about $200-300 (price subject to change without notice). The Ethernet chip set is about $60-70. The power supply for the Ethernet is about $20. SCSI chip is about $15. The cost of parts is about 50% of the cost of the board... We got AMAZINGLY good support on the first 50 boards we did - we obtained $50,000 worth of chips for nothing (and passed the savings on to you, I will add for those people following news.admin this week ;-) Let's not push it. National deserves the money for these components. If you can convince your local rep that you have a valid application for the GX, great. If you can't, then pay the price... [in my opinion, of course] -- Dave Rand {pyramid|mips|bct|vsi1}!daver!dlr Internet: dlr@daver.bungi.com