[rescue] SMP on intel wasteful?

[Dave McGuire]

On June 24, Stephen D. B. Wolthusen wrote:
> > Then look at
> > ROM monitor ("BIOS" for you PeeCee guys) support.  Four partitions?
> > No diag capabilities?  No analog of "environment variable" support to
> > pass defaults to the booting OS?  Come ON, the VAX had that in 1978.
> 
> No. The 11/780 (which I assume is what you mean) most definitely did not have a
> ROM monitor. It had an LSI-11. And depending on what functions you need, it
> wasn't ROM, it was an RX01/RX02. 

  I hadn't intended to speak in such specific terms, but yes, you are
indeed correct...it was a pdp11/03 with an RX floppy drive in the
bottom of the 11/780 CPU cabinet.  What I meant was basically this:
You can walk up to the console after powering up the machine and
*interact* with it before booting...setting parameters, running
diagnostics, etc.  Yes,

> ROM came only with the 11/750, which was after '78 as far as I know.

  The 11/750 was indeed after the /780.  It also booted its microcode
and monitor from a separate (i.e. non-CPU) device...a TU58 tape drive.

        -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire                  "Needing a calculator indicates that
St. Petersburg, FL              your .emacs file is incomplete." -Joshua Boyd