30 Mar
2017
30 Mar
'17
5:17 a.m.
On Wed, Mar 29, 2017 at 3:38 AM, Joerg Schilling <schily(a)schily.net> wrote:
George Ross <gdmr(a)inf.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
The method to "upgrade" a Sun-3/50 was to pull the gate arrays and add a
doughter board. There have been such extensions from "Sunflower". A company
that was latrer forced by Sun to rename into "Solflower".
I know people that did unnatural things to upgrade the Sun 3/50 to
something that had enough memory not to suck. Oh, and to have real
disks, rather than the crazy SCSI to ESDI disks that had performance
only marginally better than floppy drives.... IIRC, the hard part
was getting a VME "cage" to allow other cards to in inserted, which
killed the pizza-box implementation of the 3/50. But it's been a long
time since that happened, and maybe I'm misremembering. Maybe that was
only possible with the 3/60.
Warner
I think
that the 3/50 was a "single board" VME system... and as you say
you really couldn't add anything to it.
IIRC the only way to add anything to it was to pull the processor from its
socket, plug in a daughterboard, and then plug the processor back into that.
It did feel a whole lot more responsive with that extra 8MB of memory!