Nostalgia: VMEbus and OS-9

2022-06-15 06:35:55

Recently I've been thinking back about old computing gear I used to own, or worked on in college. Nostalgia has a tendency to tint things rose, but that's okay. I get pangs of regret for getting rid of all my "antiques" (like the Televideo vt100 terminal, the 8088 IBM clone, my first own computer the Pressario CDS524) but to paraphrase the meme: "Ain't nobody got room fo' all that!"

Still, it was really cool to run RedHat 5 on the Compaq and having the Televideo hang off COM1 to act as extra screen and keyboard.

Anyway... that blog post I linked to, regarding RH5, also mentions OS-9. OS-9 was (is, thanks to NitrOS9). It was an OS ahead of its time, with true multi-user and multi-processing, with realtime processing all on at the time relatively affordable hardware. It had MacOS and Windows beat by at least a decade and Linux was but a glint in the eyes of the future.

I've been doing some learning! In that linked blog post I referred to a non-descript orange "server". Turns out, that's the wrong word to use!

In reality that was a VMEbus "crate" (probably 6U) with space for about 8-10 boards. Yes it used Arcnet to communicate with our workstations, but those also turn out to be VMEbus "crates", but more like development boxen with room for 1-2 boards in a desktop box.

Looking at pictures on the web, it's very likely that the lab ran OS-9 on MVME147 boards that were in each of the crates.

Color me surprised to learn that VMEbus and its successors are still very much in active use, in places like CERN but also in the military! But also in big medical gear, like this teardown of an Afga X-Ray machine shows.

Cool stuff! Now I wanna play with an MC68k box again. :)


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