On Mon, May 22, 2023 at 10:09 PM Douglas Crawford via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
Thanks that a great short overview of the DEC side, thanks.
You bet!
Did the minicomputers gather much 3rd party support for cards on their buses? I'm going to guess some, but not near as much as what happened in microcomputers, perhaps simply due to installed base/market size being relatively larger on the microcomputer platforms.
As Dave said, lots and lots! My employer for most of 1984-1994 _made_ Qbus, Unibus, and VAXBI boards (COMBOARDs - m68k + USART + RAM to run IBM protocol emulators). Emulex, Dilog, Systems Industries, Western Peripherals, Peritek... so many 3rd-party board vendors for DEC boxes. Memory, and disk controllers, and tape controllers were made in abundance by 3rd parties. CPU boards, not so much. Even in Heathkit boxes where you were soldering your own serial/parallel cards and the backplane, it took a DEC-made CPU board. We used to buy "DEC Kit" bus chip packages directly from Digital. Outside of the VAXBI, they were very generous with information and OEM parts. -ethan