pff@elmgate.UUCP (Paul Fetter) (07/31/87)
I have some questions about the Public Domain 32000 described in
Micro Cornucopia #32 (Oct-Nov 1986).
First what is SOG V (the group that sponsored this effort)? In
the articles about the system they mentioned that the designers,
Dave Rand and George Scolaro are putting the board artwork, cir-
cuit design, and basic software drivers into the public domain.
Has this come about, specifically is the board artwork available
(or is it possible to order a bare board from someplace)? Has
anyone built this system and possibly ported MINIX to it as well
as the GNU C compiler?? If not, how much work would it be to do
so?
Thanks in advance.
Paul Fetter
uucp: rutgers!rochester!kodak!elmgate!husky!pffagnew@trwrc.UUCP (07/31/87)
In article <696@elmgate.UUCP>, pff@elmgate.UUCP (Paul Fetter) writes: > > I have some questions about the Public Domain 32000 described in > Micro Cornucopia #32 (Oct-Nov 1986). > First what is SOG V (the group that sponsored this effort)? In > the articles about the system they mentioned that the designers, > Dave Rand and George Scolaro are putting the board artwork, cir- > cuit design, and basic software drivers into the public domain. Sog stands for "Semi-official Get-together", an annual social event sponsored by Micro-C. You can order the bare board from Steve Hope at Definicon Systems, 1-805-499-0652 (they don't have UUCP or even UNIX there) but I don't reccommend it. I just spent 2 months rounding up all the parts (~$300 with 1M memory) and I still cant get it to work. Steve at Definicon has been a great help, but not enough! Dave Rand moved to Canada and I don't know where George is. I used to think a great deal of Dave Rand but now I have nothing but flames for him. He has not put one drop of PD software for the driver source on the Micro-C board as promised. Steve has put the PROM binaries and Palasm files on Trevor Marshall's bulletin board at 1-805-492-5472. I think Dave and the people at Micro-C owe us a big apology for the hoax that they pulled over on us. I am stuck with $400 and 2 months labor into a piece of useless junk. There are no memory diagnostics such as "memtest" that Trevor wrote for the DSI-32 and there is no way to debug it short of writing your own 32000 assembly code and burning it in prom. (I use my DSI-32 to generate the code). If Rand had made the source for the "load" program available one could at least download it from the PC instead of "promming" it. You can order the built and tested card from Definicon for about $500 for the 10Mhz, 1Mbyte version and then $600 for the UNIX liscense. I want to use the board for a SCSI disk controller for the DSI-32 because of the terrible bottle-neck on the PC bus.