From Axel.Neumann@epost.de Sun Nov 9 00:13:13 2003 Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2003 14:02:46 +0200 From: Axel Neumann To: king.fisher@triad.nu Subject: Diab [ The following text is in the "windows-1252" character set. ] [ Your display is set for the "ISO-8859-1" character set. ] [ Some characters may be displayed incorrectly. ] Hi Linus, I have seen your webpage about Diab Data. Even as my understanding of Swedish is not good I saw that there is a lot of white space in there. I hope that I can shed some light on some Diab products. I worked several years for Cromemco in Germany a subsidiary of Dynatech Computer System that OEMed some Diab products. Here is a short historical wrap up. In 1974 two students at the Stanford University in California founded Cromemco Inc. Cromemco builds computer systems based on S100 bus and various CPUs (Z80, 68010, 68020). In the mid 1980s they started a project (project name Mammoth) to develop a multi-CPU system based on MC68020 and VMEbus. In 1987 Cromemco was aquired by the Dynatech Corporation (at the time being well known for their X.25 equipment). AFAIK one reason for this was that Cromemco suites very well to another Dynatech company Colorgraphics. Colorgraphics had a product to produce weather forecast clips for TV that was based on Cromemco hardware. Shortly after the acquisition Dynatech stopped the project Mammoth and renamed Cromemco in to Dynatech Computer Systems (DCS). As replacement for Mammoth they choose to OEM the Diab DS90-30 and DS90-31. The OEM agreement not only allowed DCS to re-label the Diab systems but also to manufacture the whole system. On CeBIT 1989 Cromemco Germany introduced the Diab DS90-30 as DCS-1/300 and the DS90-31 as DCS-1/400 to the world. This was a very early introduction due to the fact that D-NIX 5.3 operating system for the system was release 0.9. In 1990 DCS introduced its own low-cost version of the DS90-30 the DCS-1/200. It was a DS90-30 in a PC Big Tower housing. In the same year DCS OEMed the Diab 2450 (?) as DCS-4/300 and the DS90-41 as DCS-4/400. With these systems only a re-labeling took place. Here is the technical data of the systems: DCS-1/200 - 1 MC68030 33 MHz - 4 - 32 MB RAM - 3 SCSI-1 Controller - 4 - 12 serial ports - 5.25" Floppy 1.2 MB - 1 SCSI QIC-Streamer - 1 internal SCSI HDD - 4 VMEbus slots 32bit - 2 Databoard slots In three of the VMEbus slots you could plug in a so called Terminal Concentrator board with 10 serial ports. So the full equipped system could utilize 42 serial ports. DCS-1/300 = DS90-30 Identically with DCS-1/200 except that it could utilize 2 CPUs and up to 64 MB of RAM. DCS-1/400 = DS90-31 - 19" Rack (the base system occupied only a part of the rack) - 1 - 4 MC68030 33 MHz - 4 - 64 MB RAM - 3 SCSI-1 Controller - 4 - 12 serial ports - 5.25" Floppy 1.2 MB - 1 SCSI QIC-Streamer (base system) - 1 SCSI HDD (base system) - 6 VMEbus slots 32bit - 2 Databoard slots The system could be expanded with two additional racks. The fully expanded system could utilize several disks, streamer and more then 200 serial ports. DCS-4/300 = Diab 2540 (?) - 1 -2 MC68040 25 MHz - 8 ? 64 MB RAM - 3 SCSI-2 Controller - 4 - 12 serial ports - 3.5" Floppy 1.44 MB - 1 SCSI QIC-Streamer - Space for 2 additional 5.25" HH SCSI devices i.e. DAT-Streamer - 1 - 3 internal SCSI HDD - 4 VMEbus slots 32bit - 2 Databoard slots The system could also be expanded to 32 serial ports. DCS-4/400 = DS90-41 - 19" Rack (the base system occupied only a part of the rack) - 1 - 4 MC68040 25 MHz - 8 - 128 MB RAM - 3 SCSI-2 Controller - 4 - 12 serial ports - 5.25" Floppy 1.2 MB - 1 SCSI QIC-Streamer (base system) - 1 SCSI HDD (base system) - 6 VMEbus slots 32bit - 2 Databoard slots The system expansion is identical with the DS90-31. All serial ports on each system are using the DB15 form factor. The Diab D-NIX 5.3 operating system that was running on the systems had the following features: - Unix System V.3 compliant - Realtime scheduler - Bit-mapped file system to reduce fragmentation - 1 file system per disk by default (AFAIK max. 1 GB/MC68030, 2 GB/MC68040) - no separate swap space (swap used the root file system from the last block to the beginning) - kernel parameter were changed directly in the kernel file via a "debugger front-end" - some programs (i.e. ls) could run without the kernel in case of emergency With an additional software package it was possible to mirror disks. On MC68040 systems it allowed also to have more then one partition per disk. HTH, Axel Neumann