Cheng.PA@PARC-MAXC.ARPA (06/25/83)
A friend of mine is working on a project that requires a 68000 as a smart controller for a large system that has stepper motors, valves, gauges, sensors, RF plasma, etc... He likes to find out all available information as well as pros and cons on various hardware and software issues. Your help and input will be greatly appreciated. Here are some sample questions, but any related topics are of interest. What is available on the market? Hardwarewise for development as well as for the final product. Are VME bus more reliable than say Multibus? Can one translate from Multibus to VME? Could one develop the software and hardware on a system (say a desktop workstation) and latter on replace rams by roms? Are programs residing in rom more reliable than ram loaded from disks. What are some good operating systems for this purpose? Multitasking is a must. Is UNIX a practical solution for a stand alone system? Can a bare bone subset be put into the ROM with rest of the program? What are good language systems? C, Pascal? Who has good compilers for this purpose? What about emulators? Are they a must for a development system? The program plus OS will be esitmated 256K or so. Any systems has real time symbolic debugger? There may be lots of related questions, please feel free to comment. I shall collect all responses for the interested public. Thanks, David