Cloned computers
Greg Maddog Knauss
has been knocked-off over the years. These are the ones I know of:
Original Clones
------------------------------- -------------------------------
IBM (PC/AT/etc.) [Billions and billions...]
Apple II(+/e/c) Franklin (1000/1200), Laser 128
Tandy Color Computer Dragon 32
Tandy TRS-80 Video Genie
Macintosh [Rumored. Asian and American.]
Anything else?
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Greg "Maddog" Knauss My boss doesn't know I'm doing this,
gr...@duke.quotron.com so I doubt he'd agree with me.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Richard Chapman
>The recent talk of various Tandy clones made me wonder how much hardware
>has been knocked-off over the years. These are the ones I know of:
>Original Clones
>------------------------------- -------------------------------
>IBM (PC/AT/etc.) [Billions and billions...]
>Apple II(+/e/c) Franklin (1000/1200), Laser 128
>Tandy Color Computer Dragon 32
>Tandy TRS-80 Video Genie
>Macintosh [Rumored. Asian and American.]
>Anything else?
Amdahl cloned IBM mainframes in the '70s. I think Terak cloned the pdp-8.
I have read that the Soviet Union supported exactly 3 architectures at
one point: Clone of Intel 8080, Clone of DEC pdp-11, Clone of IBM 370.
le...@epx.cis.umn.edu
>gr...@Quotron.COM (Greg "Maddog" Knauss) writes:
>
>>The recent talk of various Tandy clones made me wonder how much hardware
>>has been knocked-off over the years. These are the ones I know of:
>
>>Original Clones
>>------------------------------- -------------------------------
>>IBM (PC/AT/etc.) [Billions and billions...]
>>Apple II(+/e/c) Franklin (1000/1200), Laser 128
>>Tandy Color Computer Dragon 32
>>Tandy TRS-80 Video Genie
>>Macintosh [Rumored. Asian and American.]
>
>>Anything else?
>
>Amdahl cloned IBM mainframes in the '70s. I think Terak cloned the pdp-8.
WRONG. Terak 'cloned' the PDP-11 (actually, LSI-11).
Terak users of the world, UNITE!
-Lawrence LeMay
le...@epx.cis.umn.edu
Charles Lasner
>
>>The recent talk of various Tandy clones made me wonder how much hardware
>>has been knocked-off over the years. These are the ones I know of:
>
>>Original Clones
>
No, -11,
>
>I have read that the Soviet Union supported exactly 3 architectures at
>one point: Clone of Intel 8080, Clone of DEC pdp-11, Clone of IBM 370.
And the PDP-8. They called it a "TPA" I saw a picture of it; looked just
like a PDP-8/l. The article pointed out that it was non-DIN compatible.
(I think DIN was what they referred to their 360/370 clones.)
What about RCA's Spectra-70?
cjl
CP/M lives!
JohnC
>one point: Clone of Intel 8080, Clone of DEC pdp-11, Clone of IBM 370.
There was a BYTE article years ago about a Soviet clone of the Apple ][. It
was called the Agat, as I recall. Wierd, wierd machine.
--
John Cavallino | EMail: jc...@midway.uchicago.edu
University of Chicago Hospitals | John_Ca...@uchfm.bsd.uchicago.edu
Office of Facilities Management | USMail: 5841 S. Maryland Ave, MC 0953
B0 f++ c+ g++ k s++ e+ h- pv | Chicago, IL 60637
Dave Brown
>The recent talk of various Tandy clones made me wonder how much hardware
>has been knocked-off over the years. These are the ones I know of:
>
>Original Clones
>------------------------------- -------------------------------
>IBM (PC/AT/etc.) [Billions and billions...]
>Apple II(+/e/c) Franklin (1000/1200), Laser 128
>Tandy Color Computer Dragon 32
>Tandy TRS-80 Video Genie
>Macintosh [Rumored. Asian and American.]
Macintosh Amiga
Sinclair Spectrum Amiga
Atari ST Amiga
Commodore 64 Amiga
BBC Micro Amiga
CP/M Machines (2.2) Amiga
--
Dave Brown
dagb...@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca
Phone: (519) 725-6896
"I believe the word you're looking for is, 'AAAARRGH!!!!'" - The Penguin
David Fetrow
machines.
--
- dave fetrow- fet...@biostat.washington.edu
"A few areas of engineering remain "black arts": acoustics, LF antenna
design, and high performance UNIX I/O." -Dave Taber
Mr Stephen R Usher
>In article <greg.712512455@duke> gr...@Quotron.COM (Greg "Maddog" Knauss) writes:
>>The recent talk of various Tandy clones made me wonder how much hardware
>>has been knocked-off over the years. These are the ones I know of:
>>
>>Original Clones
>>------------------------------- -------------------------------
>>IBM (PC/AT/etc.) [Billions and billions...]
>>Apple II(+/e/c) Franklin (1000/1200), Laser 128
>>Tandy Color Computer Dragon 32
>>Tandy TRS-80 Video Genie
>>Macintosh [Rumored. Asian and American.]
> IBM (PC/AT/etc) Amiga
> Macintosh Amiga
> Sinclair Spectrum Amiga
> Atari ST Amiga
> Commodore 64 Amiga
> BBC Micro Amiga
> CP/M Machines (2.2) Amiga
Macintosh Atari ST/TT (Software)
Apple II Atari ST/TT (Software Emu)
Commodore 64 Atari ST/TT (Software Emu)
Atari 400/800(XL) Atari ST/TT (Software Emu)
Sinclair ZX81 Atari ST/TT (Software Emu)
Sinclair ZX Spectrum Atari ST/TT (Software Emu)
Hobbit Micro (exUSSR)
CPM Atari ST/TT (Software Emu)
Key
---
Software Software needed to interface hardware only
Software Emu Software emulates whole computer (inc CPU)
Hardware Extra Hardware runs emulation (eg CPU)
>--
>Dave Brown
>dagb...@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca
>Phone: (519) 725-6896
>"I believe the word you're looking for is, 'AAAARRGH!!!!'" - The Penguin
Steve
--
Addresses:-
JANET:- uca...@uk.ac.ucl or st...@uk.ac.ox.earth (preferable)
Internet:- uca...@ucl.ac.uk or st...@earth.ox.ac.uk (preferable)
THE Upholder of Truth
Macintosh Outbound portables
Actually, this may or may not quallify as a clone as old Apple ROMs
are used (usually canabalized from dead Mac Plus machines).
--
The Upholder of Truth I am not only ready to
Upho...@uiuc.edu (BSD/ASCII mail) retract this, but also
jar4...@sumter.cso.uiuc.edu (NeXT mail) deny I said anything. =)
wi....@wizvax.methuen.ma.us (anon. mail) This is *NOT* CCSO's opinion.
Mike Berger
>has been knocked-off over the years. These are the ones I know of:
>Original Clones
>------------------------------- -------------------------------
>IBM (PC/AT/etc.) [Billions and billions...]
>Apple II(+/e/c) Franklin (1000/1200), Laser 128
>Tandy Color Computer Dragon 32
>Tandy TRS-80 Video Genie
>Macintosh [Rumored. Asian and American.]
>Anything else?
*----
Xerox, Amdahl, and CDC all made IBM mainframe clones.
Nuclear Data had Data General Nova look-alikes.
--
Mike Berger
Department of Statistics, University of Illinois
AT&TNET 217-244-6067
Internet ber...@atropa.stat.uiuc.edu
Mike Berger
>>Amdahl cloned IBM mainframes in the '70s. I think Terak cloned the pdp-8.
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>WRONG. Terak 'cloned' the PDP-11 (actually, LSI-11).
I refrained from mentioning this in my list because it's not
technically correct. Terak used the LSI-11 chipset, but their
machines weren't exact pdp-11 clones, and if the instruction
set is all that counts, there isn't much point to the discussion.
Daan Sandee
|> gr...@Quotron.COM (Greg "Maddog" Knauss) writes:
|> *----
|> Xerox, Amdahl, and CDC all made IBM mainframe clones.
|> Mike Berger
Amdahl, certainly. Xerox, dunno. CDC - I think not.
Daan Sandee san...@think.com
Thinking Machines Corporation
Cambridge, Mass 02142 (617) 234-5044
Scott Telford
> The recent talk of various Tandy clones made me wonder how much hardware
> has been knocked-off over the years. These are the ones I know of:
> Tandy Color Computer Dragon 32
I don't think the Dragon 32 was so much of a clone, just that both
machines were built to similar (Motorola) specifications (same video
chip, same Basic, same memory map..). That was the story I heard,
anyway.
> Anything else?
Sinclair ZX81 MicroAce
Sinclair ZX Spectrum Several (I remember reports of Brazilian,
Soviet and Indian clones, can't remember the names, also MGT SAM Coupe)
Apple II Wasn't there a portable clone called the Excalibur?
Lots of hardware has been cloned by the Soviets over the years...
--
Scott Telford, Dept of Computer Science, electric mail: s.te...@ed.ac.uk
University of Edinburgh, Mayfield Rd, Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ, UK.
------- Rollin' over like a big, big cloud/Walkin' out in the Big Sky! --------
Vadim Antonov
marked with *):
ORIGINAL CLONE
IBM/360 *ES-1020, ES-1022, ES-1025, ES-1030, *ES-1033, *ES-1040
various models *M-4030 (?)
IBM/370 ES-1035, ES-1036, ES-1037, *ES-1045, ES-1046,
various models *ES-1050, *ES-1055
and some others (can't recall, sorry)
HP-3000 SM-1/SM-2 (really incompatible)
Mitra (?) ES-1010 (R-10), ES-1011 (R-11)
PDP-8 Saratov
LSI-11 Elektronika-60, *DVK-1, *DVK-2, SM-1300, Mera 60
PDP-11/20 SM-3
PDP-11/34 SM-4, Elektronika-100/25, S-100 (?), Mera 125(?),
*Nairi-4
PDP-11/40 *SM-1610, *SM-1420 (up to 4Mb RAM but no sep I/D),
*SM-1301 (micro), *Robotron K1610
PDP-11/60 SM-52/11
PDP-11/70 Elektronika-79
DEC Pro 350 Elektronika-85, *DVK-3.2, *DVK-4
PDP-11/73 SM-1425
VAX-11/730 SM-1700
VAX-11/750 Elektronika-82
VAX-11/780 SM-52/12, SM-1055
uVAX I Elektronika-86
Wang (?) Iskra-225
IBM PC/XT *Robotron 1603 (?), *Iskra-1030, *ES-????, SM-1804 (?)
VT-20
TRS-80 Irisha, Radio-80 and a lot of other amateur things
Apple Agat-1
after that the Soviet computer industry rest in peace. All inaccuracies
are mine (i was recalling the list from my flakey memory).
--vadim
PS. The list of ORIGINAL designs (the ones i saw):
Tubes & Relays:
Ural, Razdan
Transistors:
M-220, BESM-4, BESM-6, MIR-1, MIR-2, Nairi-1, Nairi-2, Nairi-3,
Minsk-22, Minsk-32, K-1, Setun' (a *ternary* machine)
ICs:
SM-1200, SM-1210, PS-2000, PS-3000, PS-320, SVS 1K2, Elbrus-1,
Elbrus-2, Elbrus-B (a BESM-6 successor, runs U*ix), TA-100, TM-130,
TK-210, Skala (the one's running Chernobyl)
PPS. How to decode manufacturers from the names:
SM-???? - Minpribor, INEUM
PS-??? - Minpribor
TM-,TK-,TA- - Minpribor, NZTA (my dad's machines :-)
SM-??/?? - Bulgary
Mera - Poland, Mera
Robotron - East Germany, Robotron
ELektronika, DVK - Minelektronprom
BESM-, Elbrus - ITM & VT (Minsredmash ?)
ES-???? - mostly NICEVT, some are Bulgarian or German
ES-101?, VT- - Videoton, Hungary
Adrian Le Hanne
>gr...@Quotron.COM (Greg "Maddog" Knauss) writes:
>>The recent talk of various Tandy clones made me wonder how much hardware
>>has been knocked-off over the years. These are the ones I know of:
>>Original Clones
>>------------------------------- -------------------------------
>>IBM (PC/AT/etc.) [Billions and billions...]
>>Apple II(+/e/c) Franklin (1000/1200), Laser 128
>>Tandy Color Computer Dragon 32
>>Tandy TRS-80 Video Genie
>>Macintosh [Rumored. Asian and American.]
>>Anything else?
>Xerox, Amdahl, and CDC all made IBM mainframe clones.
The Siemens (barf) series of BS2000 mainframes were IBM mainframe clones,
one could run the Siemens proprietary system (no comment ;) or IBM MVS.
I believe, the cpu itself was made by Hitachi, can someone correct me here?
> Mike Berger
Adrian
--
Adrian S. Le Hanne Einoed Unix & Netzwerke, Koepenicker Str.154, D-1000
a...@einoed.in-berlin.de Berlin 36. Tel.: 030/611 31 26, Fax.: 030/826 98 75
"Christianity Is Stupid" -Negativland
Mike Berger
>In article <Bs9Ep...@news.cso.uiuc.edu>, berger@atropa (Mike Berger) writes:
>|> gr...@Quotron.COM (Greg "Maddog" Knauss) writes:
>|> *----
>|> Xerox, Amdahl, and CDC all made IBM mainframe clones.
>|> --
>|> Mike Berger
>Amdahl, certainly. Xerox, dunno. CDC - I think not.
*----
They certainly appear to have, from an old publications list.
I think it was called the Omega series.
Rob Spray
>Nuclear Data had Data General Nova look-alikes.
DCC had a clone of the Data General Nova
The Redifon R2000 was a superset of the CCC (Honeywell) DDP-124
The English Electric (ICL) System 4 was a clone of the RCA Spectra/70.
The ICT 1900 was a clone of a Canadian Ferranti-Packard machine,
or was that the other way around? (Any other old farts out there? B-))
The first PR1ME machines were supersets of the CCC (Honeywell) DDP-516.
--Rob sp...@convex.com
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. I saw attack
ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams
glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All these memories
will be lost in time...like tears in rain. Time to die."
Charles Lasner
>The list of Eastern Bloc clones of Westen computers (semi-clones
>marked with *):
>
>ORIGINAL CLONE
>
>PDP-8 Saratov
>
My understanding of the Hungarian rip-off PDP-8/l was that it was called a
"TPA". I saw a picture of it where there were two of them placed one over
the other, complete with the front panel and switches. Except for the Digital
logo, I could swear they were made in a famous former woolen mill in New
England :-). The article pointed out that they weren't compatible with
IBM 360/370 knockoffs, and that the picture shown was a "multi-processor"
configuration. Yeah! PDP-8's used in multi-processors? (Give me a break; this
was just a picture of two machines in a little pile!)
Obviously portions of this were just a little cold-war propaganda.
In 1967, I went the the world's fair, Expo '67 in Montreal. The Russian
pavillion was designed to awe the technologically ignorant. There was a
hoaxed model of a Russian-designed transistor radio from 1935 :-). On
one side was an exhibit of pseudo-hyped electronics: some crystals not
even as good as Army-surplus WW II crystals were displayed as "Piezo-electric
Resonators" which of course is accurate, but hardly technologically advanced.
The whole building had a cute light-chaser display through it, but hardly
of technical achievement value.
To contrast this, the big deal about the American pavillion was that Brian
Wilson's guitar had been stolen :-).
cjl (back in the US, back in the US, back in the USSR)
Otto Tennant
> In article <1992Jul30....@cs.cornell.edu> cha...@cs.cornell.edu (Richard Chapman) writes:
> >gr...@Quotron.COM (Greg "Maddog" Knauss) writes:
> >
> >>The recent talk of various Tandy clones made me wonder how much hardware
> >>has been knocked-off over the years. These are the ones I know of:
>
> What about RCA's Spectra-70?
It couldn't really be considered a "clone". The user instruction set
was the same, but the supervisor mode (and instructions) was different.
> cjl
>
--
===============================================================================
J.Otto Tennant Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit. j...@cray.com
Cray Research, Inc. Virgil (612) 683-5872
665 Lone Oak Drive
Eagan, MN 55121
Vadim Antonov
>My understanding of the Hungarian rip-off PDP-8/l was that it was called a
>"TPA".
Never heard.
>Obviously portions of this were just a little cold-war propaganda.
Hm. Not exactly. It's a public display of stupidity of communists
(if you've got to be not a party member you could forget about
travelling abroad, leave alone preparing exhibitions).
>In 1967, I went the the world's fair, Expo '67 in Montreal. The Russian
>pavillion was designed to awe the technologically ignorant. There was a
>hoaxed model of a Russian-designed transistor radio from 1935 :-).
Model was surely a hoax, though the first semiconductor circuit able to
amplify signals was indeed invented by Losev in '35 (it was called "crystadine"
and basically was a kind of tunnel diode, not transistor).
>On
>one side was an exhibit of pseudo-hyped electronics: some crystals not
>even as good as Army-surplus WW II crystals were displayed as "Piezo-electric
>Resonators" which of course is accurate, but hardly technologically advanced.
Pfrrr. Aren't those modern quratz oscillators you can found in every piece
of electronics are basically the same? I doubt their quality got really
much better since WWII. And crystallography always was a strong science in
Russia. Though, i believe the packaging was pretty ugly.
The decline in Soviet electronics started at about 1970, when a bunch of
ministries was created to rule the new industry. At the time when electronics
was considered a branch of the space/nuclear project it was quite at the leading
age in Soviet Union. Even now the Soviet military electroinics is generally
considered pretty dumb but working under any conditions. Doing complex things
with simple circuits became a kind of art :-) The same applies to mechanics --
look inside the Kalashnikov assault rifle -- it's unbelievably simple and
effective. As a matter of fact, the American high-tech gizmos was always
a target for tongue-in-cheek remarks about killing a fly with a barrel gun.
The common rule in (ex-) Soviet Union was that research and engineering was
quite at the level. The production was (and is) a disaster. To produce things
you need a working economy. To invent them -- quick guts. An empty stomach
was always considered a booster for creativity 1/2 :-)
--vadim
Rick Smith
was a clone of IBM's 709x line of 36 bit machines, whose software
became orphaned when IBM started up their 360 line.
Rick.
sm...@sctc.com arden hills, minnesota
Thaddeus P. Floryan
>
> Nobody mentioned (yet) the PDP-10 clones like the Foonly and System Concepts
>machines.
I did; maybe my article hasn't propogated yet.
Given DEC's failure with the Jupiter, the Foonly (offshoot of the SuperFoonly
Project at Stanford) family was a nice successor. The F-1 was a real number
cruncher (and only one was ever built); the F-4 was the "common" model and
I believe its primary customer was the military, though the old Office
Automation project ("Augie") from SRI-International ran on some. One of my
commercial products ported to the F-4 in almost no time, but there were a
few minor problems since the Foonly systems ran Tenex and my product was
TOPS-20 based (TOPS-20 had quite a few more JSYSs than did Tenex).
Only saw one Systems Concept box; it was in use at LOTS (Low Overhead
Timesharing System/Service/whatever) at Stanford. I remember opening the
cabinet and asking "Where's the computer?" since the thing was so compact
yet was placed into a standard "rack" case since that's all that was
available. Incredible machine; was about 6x the power of the KL-20 CPU
and ran TOPS-20 without any change.
Someone in another newsgroup recently mentioned that SC's "problem" was one
of marketing; they engineered an incredible system, but hadn't the marketing
acumen to sell it. 'Tis a shame.
HOWEVER (and note I recently mentioned my desire to play the ol' games Zork,
Adventure, HAUNT, Fisk, and LUGI), I have been informed that several people
who've left a well-known Menlo Park CA networking company have set up shop
up near Seattle and will soon bring to market a desktop DEC-20; this will
really be a "turnkey application box" which "just so happens" to run TOPS-20!
Though I wasn't sworn to secrecy or placed under non-disclosure, I won't
say any more because I don't want to spoil their pending announcement(s)
[which hopefully will be soon].
Thad Floryan [ th...@btr.com (OR) {decwrl, mips, fernwood}!btr!thad ]
Tom Watson
> Xerox, Amdahl, and CDC all made IBM mainframe clones.
No, Xerox did NOT make any IBM clones. They took over and tubed Scientific
Data Systems (SDS), called it Xerox Data Systems (XDS) and they made
their own machines. The structure of the 32 bit ones was similar to IBM 360's
but a bunch of things were different.
Same:
8 bit bytes
I/O channel structure (some even used the same channel IO codes)
EBCDIC (good, or bad take your pick)
Different:
Floating point numbers (negative ones were 2's complement, not sign/magnitude)
Indexing methods
No seperate floating point registers
Instruction sets
memory capacity
paging methods
They were really not a bad machine, and with proper stuff, timesharing did
happen (IBM's TSO was a different story).
Smaller configurations could be limited in scope though.
If you call DG's Nova's clones of PDP-11's then the comparison of clones might be
valid, but not otherwise.
--------
Tom Watson
johana!t...@apple.com
Steven D Ourada
TI 99/4A computer was cloned. I can't find the ad I once saw to figure
out what the name of the company was, though.
Talk about bad decisions. Riding the coattails of one of the least
successful micro manufacturers...
Later,
Steven Ourada
--
-----------------
Steven Ourada Member of the Students for Electronic Freedom
Ask me how Iowa State University is censoring my Usenet access!
sou...@iastate.edu "can't casts no shadow" -- cummings
Steve Browne
>has been knocked-off over the years. These are the ones I know of:
>
>
>Anything else?
>Greg "Maddog" Knauss My boss doesn't know I'm doing this,
>gr...@duke.quotron.com so I doubt he'd agree with me.
cloned in Russia, and was apparantly quite a good seller. Can't remember what
it was called though. The Pearcom II was also an Apple II clone IIRC.
-----------------------------
ber...@cix.compulink.co.uk
sbr...@mcimail.com
Steve Browne @ Notes
Rich Greenberg
>gr...@Quotron.COM (Greg "Maddog" Knauss) writes:
>>The recent talk of various Tandy clones made me wonder how much hardware
>>has been knocked-off over the years. These are the ones I know of:
. . . list deleted for the sake of bandwidth. We have all seen it . . .
>Xerox, Amdahl, and CDC all made IBM mainframe clones.
and Hitachi, and IPL, and at least 2 or 3 others I can't think of the names of.
--
Rich Greenberg - N6LRT - 310-649-0238 - ri...@hatch.socal.com
Lee D. Rothstein
In article <1992Jul30.1...@news.columbia.edu>
las...@watsun.cc.columbia.edu writes:
> In article <1992Jul30....@cs.cornell.edu> cha...@cs.cornell.edu
> (Richard Chapman) writes:
> >gr...@Quotron.COM (Greg "Maddog" Knauss) writes:
...
> >Amdahl cloned IBM mainframes in the '70s. I think Terak cloned the pdp-8.
> What about RCA's Spectra-70?
Was the Xerox (nee Scientific Data Systems--SDS) Sigma-9 BAL compatible?
/-------------------------------------------------------\
/Lee D. Rothstein 603-424-2900\
/ New Science Associates, Inc. Fax: 603-424-8549 \
\ 7 Merrymeeting Drive Email: l...@merrymeeting.mv.com /
\Merrimack, NH 03054-2934 IEEE Computer Society, NH/
\-------------------------------------------------------/
Otto Tennant
>
>In article <1992Jul30.1...@news.columbia.edu>
>las...@watsun.cc.columbia.edu writes:
>
> > In article <1992Jul30....@cs.cornell.edu> cha...@cs.cornell.edu
> > (Richard Chapman) writes:
>
> > >gr...@Quotron.COM (Greg "Maddog" Knauss) writes:
>
> ...
>
> > >Amdahl cloned IBM mainframes in the '70s. I think Terak cloned the pdp-8.
>
>
> > What about RCA's Spectra-70?
>
>Was the Xerox (nee Scientific Data Systems--SDS) Sigma-9 BAL compatible?
The Sigma-9 is considerably different from a 360. In fact, I can't
think of much in common except for the word length and two's
complement arithmetic. Even the notion of the EBCDIC character set
was different (something that took me many long nights to notice.)
Thomas Koenig
>The Siemens (barf) series of BS2000 mainframes were IBM mainframe clones,
>one could run the Siemens proprietary system (no comment ;) or IBM MVS.
>I believe, the cpu itself was made by Hitachi, can someone correct me here?
I worked for a time on a Siemens 7881 running BS3000; that computer was
actually manufactured by Fujitsu, the OS' orininal name was MSP, and it
was an MVS clone. The manual for the Fortran compiler was a nightmare,
and so were the error messages. Linking a GKS graphics program on that
machine took about 1/4 hour, IF you used the loader and not the linkage
editor; that took even longer. Still, I miss the // C U=... card :-)
Doesn't Siemens hold 20% of Fujitu stock or something like that? In
Germany, they also market and support Fujitsu's VP series. Now, these
are FAST computers...
--
Thomas Koenig, ecm...@ccu1.aukuni.ac.nz, ib...@rz.uni-karlsruhe.de
The joy of engineering is to find a straight line on a double logarithmic
diagram.
Thomas Koenig
>In article <greg.712512455@duke>, gr...@Quotron.COM (Greg "Maddog" Knauss) writes:
>> The recent talk of various Tandy clones made me wonder how much hardware
>> has been knocked-off over the years. These are the ones I know of:
>[...]
>> Tandy Color Computer Dragon 32
>I don't think the Dragon 32 was so much of a clone, just that both
>machines were built to similar (Motorola) specifications (same video
>chip, same Basic, same memory map..). That was the story I heard,
>anyway.
Does the Dragon 32 actually run OS-9? It never was very successful,
having to compete against the C-64...
Per Ekman
>gr...@Quotron.COM (Greg "Maddog" Knauss) writes:
>>The recent talk of various Tandy clones made me wonder how much hardware
>>has been knocked-off over the years. These are the ones I know of:
>>Original Clones
>>------------------------------- -------------------------------
>>IBM (PC/AT/etc.) [Billions and billions...]
>>Apple II(+/e/c) Franklin (1000/1200), Laser 128
>>Tandy Color Computer Dragon 32
>>Tandy TRS-80 Video Genie
>>Macintosh [Rumored. Asian and American.]
>>Anything else?
>*----
>Xerox, Amdahl, and CDC all made IBM mainframe clones.
>Nuclear Data had Data General Nova look-alikes.
I don't know for certain if it's true, but I've read somewhere that
a company named _Scientific_Computing_Systems_ (SCS for short) did a
Cray-1 clone. Or maybe it should be called a "Cray-1-compatible machine"
since it was supposed to have considerably less brainpower
(and smaller price-tag...) than the real thing.
-pfe
Scott Telford
ecm...@ccu1.aukuni.ac.nz (Thomas Koenig) writes:
> Does the Dragon 32 actually run OS-9? It never was very successful,
> having to compete against the C-64...
No, but the 64k model (Dragon 64, surprise, surprise 8^) had a floppy
disk system, and did run OS/9.
Phil Gustafson
name slips my mind saved hundreds if not thousands of engineering hours
by photocopying Data General circuit boards to produce a clone Nova.
Data General sued, won, caused the company to go bust, and took over
the factory to make more real Nova[se].
Phil "I'm not making this up, you know" Gustafson
--
|play: ph...@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG; {ames|pyramid|vsi1}!zorch!phil |
|work: (Under Construction) | Phil Gustafson |
| "Never give up! Never! Never! Never!" |
| H. Ross Perot, 1992 |
Douglas W. Jones,201H MLH,3193350740,3193382879
by las...@watsun.cc.columbia.edu (Charles Lasner):
> My understanding of the Hungarian rip-off PDP-8/l was that it was called a
> "TPA". I saw a picture of it where there were two of them placed one over
> the other, complete with the front panel and switches. Except for the Digital
> logo, I could swear they were made in a famous former woolen mill in New
> England :-). The article pointed out that they weren't compatible with
> IBM 360/370 knockoffs, and that the picture shown was a "multi-processor"
> configuration. Yeah! PDP-8's used in multi-processors? ...
Try using the DB8-E Interprocessor Buffer, but as I understand it, this
certainly doesn't give you a tightly coupled pair of processors.
Speaking of clones, ROLM made the RuggedNOVA under licence from Data General.
It was a Mil Specs version of the Data General Nova.
Doug Jones
jo...@cs.uiowa.edu
Matt Hucke
>
>Data General sued, won, caused the company to go bust, and took over
>the factory to make more real Nova[se].
Which didn't sell well in Spanish-speaking countries, where "No Va" means
"as reliable as a macintosh".
--
"What? Over? Did you say it's over? Nothing's over, till we decide it is!
Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!" --John Belushi
hu...@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu _ V_ a_ l_ h_ a_ l_ l_ a BBS, 217-352-3682, WWIV4.21, 14.4k
Douglas W. Jones,201H MLH,3193350740,3193382879
which was Honeywell's name for the product after they acquired Computer
Control Corporation. The full story, as I understand it, is that when
Honeywell bought CCC, some of the CCC staff quit and formed Prime.
Doug Jones
jo...@cs.uiowa.edu
Sarr J. Blumson
Not so. The original product spec was to produce a machine which
would look familiar (I think that was the phrase) to a 7090 but the
instruction sets for the 6[23]5 were definitely not the same. And of
course the 645 designed for Multics was even more different.
GE DID byukd a cute hardware emulator box that looked like a CPU to
the memory, ran the 7090 omstruction, and farmed out work to the real
CPU by pretending it was a memory.
(Sarr Blumson)
mor...@ramblr.enet.dec.com
>by las...@watsun.cc.columbia.edu (Charles Lasner):
> My understanding of the Hungarian rip-off PDP-8/l was that it was called a
> "TPA". I saw a picture of it where there were two of them placed one over
> the other, complete with the front panel and switches. Except for the Digital
> logo, I could swear they were made in a famous former woolen mill in New
> England :-). The article pointed out that they weren't compatible with
> IBM 360/370 knockoffs, and that the picture shown was a "multi-processor"
> configuration. Yeah! PDP-8's used in multi-processors? ...
For many years the VAX seemed to be the computer of choice for the Eastern
Bloc to try to smuggle. One of the Eastern Bloc countries (Bulgaria I think,
may be Hungary) reverse-engineered a VAX 11/780 and started making their own
under their own name (I forget what they called it). They were supposed to
be very faithful copies.
What's funny, with the fall of Communism and Digital opening offices in
these countries is Digital started supporting these clones.
-Mike
Vadim Antonov
>For many years the VAX seemed to be the computer of choice for the Eastern
>Bloc to try to smuggle. One of the Eastern Bloc countries (Bulgaria I think,
>may be Hungary) reverse-engineered a VAX 11/780 and started making their own
>under their own name (I forget what they called it). They were supposed to
>be very faithful copies.
Hungaria never managed to clone VAX, the machine you're talking
about is CM 52/12, Chekhoslovakia (sp?) -- i had a fortune to
use one; though it seldom worked a day without ugly crash.
Soviet VAX-en were much more reliable (SM-1700 and Elektronika-82).
But the machine of choice was PDP-11 :-)
>What's funny, with the fall of Communism and Digital opening offices in
>these countries is Digital started supporting these clones.
They started using existing facilities and personnel trained on
clones of DEC's machines. They never "supported" those clones.
--vadim
Per Ekman
>I don't know for certain if it's true, but I've read somewhere that
>a company named _Scientific_Computing_Systems_ (SCS for short) did a
>Cray-1 clone. Or maybe it should be called a "Cray-1-compatible machine"
>since it was supposed to have considerably less brainpower
>(and smaller price-tag...) than the real thing.
Seems I wasn't dreaming after all. A few random quotes from "Parallel
Computers 2" by Hockney & Jesshope (pg 51-52):
"The second minisupercomputer to be announced was the Scientific
Computer Systems SCS-40 which appeared in 1986. Like the Convex C-1,
the manifacturers claim that the SCS-40 delivers 25% of the
performance of the CRAY X-MP/1 at 15% of the cost. However, unlike the
C-1, this machine uses the CRAY instruction set, and CRAY programs
should run without alteration. [...]
[...] LINPACK benchmarks for matrices of order 100, [...] the SCS-40
reaches 7.3 Mflops/s [Comment: 24 for a single X-MP processor
according to a table in the same book.] [...]
Recoding of the LINPACK benchmarks in the terms of matrix-vector,
rather than vector-vector operations, improves the performance to 26
Mflops/s for a matrix of order 300 [Comment: 171 for an X/MP]."
-pfe
Kelvin Leung
>>
>>Original Clones
>>------------------------------- -------------------------------
>>IBM (PC/AT/etc.) [Billions and billions...]
>>Apple II(+/e/c) Franklin (1000/1200), Laser 128
>>Tandy Color Computer Dragon 32
>>Tandy TRS-80 Video Genie
>>Macintosh [Rumored. Asian and American.]
> Macintosh Amiga
> Sinclair Spectrum Amiga
> Atari ST Amiga
> Commodore 64 Amiga
> BBC Micro Amiga
> CP/M Machines (2.2) Amiga
and...
Apple ][ Amiga
BTW, Dave, what a witty follow-up! :)
>--
>Dave Brown
>dagb...@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca
>Phone: (519) 725-6896
>"I believe the word you're looking for is, 'AAAARRGH!!!!'" - The Penguin
Yours Sincerely,
kelvin
____________________________
__________________________________________/ Undergraduate, Class of 94 \___
____________________________________________________________/_____\________
| Kelvin / Internet: Kelvin...@Dartmouth.edu ({o o}) |
| Leung / or ab...@Coos.Dartmouth.edu < # ^ # > |
|__________/_______________________________________________(vvvvvvvvv)------|
| "Unless someone like you cares a whole | Aaahhhh!!! It's a beast... |
| awful lot, nothing is going to get | ... no, no... it's a doll... |
| better. It's not." | ... what is it? |
| -- Dr. Seuss (The Lorax) | either way... it's here!!! |
________________________________________^__________________________________
Charles Lasner
>name slips my mind saved hundreds if not thousands of engineering hours
>by photocopying Data General circuit boards to produce a clone Nova.
>
>Data General sued, won, caused the company to go bust, and took over
>the factory to make more real Nova[se].
DCC Digital Computer Controls. They also made a non-clone PDP-8 called
DCC-112.
cjl
Zoltan Somogyi
>My understanding of the Hungarian rip-off PDP-8/l was that it was called a
>"TPA".
I can confirm this from firsthand experience. When I was a kid in Hungary,
my father worked on this machine, model number TPA-i1001 (or some such).
I saw the machine quite frequently in 76-78 (even wrote toy programs for it),
and it certainly looked like a PDP-8 from the outside (I never saw the
inside and wouldn't be able to make a comparison even if I had). Although the
machine was itself made in the Eastern block (don't remember if it was
made in Hungary itself or not), my father and his colleagues actually used
manuals for the instruction set etc that in retrospect must have been
supplied by DEC itself, although certainly not directly to their eventual
users. (I don't think anybody in Hungary would have gone to the trouble
of copying a DEC colour scheme on the cover given how difficult to obtain
colour printing, or in fact any printing, was then.)
A true story about this machine. It was installed in a building in central
Budapest that happened to have a subway built underneath it. The subway
construction caused half the building to subside several centimeters while
the other half stood still. This required the use of whole tree trunks to
prop up the structure of the building, and a restriction was placed on
the amount of weight that was allowed to be on each floor. The machine
itself fit in the weight limit, but its airconditioning unit did not.
As a result, my father often left very early to work, the idea being to
run programs until whatever time the machine overheated, at which point
it would crash (or start to give random results; I don't remember which).
He usually got about two or three hours of useful computing per day, more
in winter if the central heating was not turned on. Convincing the powers
that be that this was a very inefficient use of a very expensive machine
turned out to be impossible.
Zoltan Somogyi <z...@cs.mu.OZ.AU>
Department of Computer Science, University of Melbourne, AUSTRALIA
Tim Swenson
>In article <Bs8H8...@undergrad.math.waterloo.edu> dagb...@napier.uwaterloo.ca (Dave Brown) writes:
>>In article <greg.712512455@duke> gr...@Quotron.COM (Greg "Maddog" Knauss) writes:
>>>The recent talk of various Tandy clones made me wonder how much hardware
>>>has been knocked-off over the years. These are the ones I know of:
>>>
>>>Original Clones
>>>------------------------------- -------------------------------
>>>IBM (PC/AT/etc.) [Billions and billions...]
>>>Apple II(+/e/c) Franklin (1000/1200), Laser 128
>>>Tandy Color Computer Dragon 32
>>>Tandy TRS-80 Video Genie
>>>Macintosh [Rumored. Asian and American.]
>> IBM (PC/AT/etc) Amiga
>> Macintosh Amiga
>> Sinclair Spectrum Amiga
>> Atari ST Amiga
>> Commodore 64 Amiga
>> BBC Micro Amiga
>> CP/M Machines (2.2) Amiga
>IBM (PC/AT/etc) Atari ST/TT (Software Emu or hardware)
>Macintosh Atari ST/TT (Software)
>Apple II Atari ST/TT (Software Emu)
>Commodore 64 Atari ST/TT (Software Emu)
>Atari 400/800(XL) Atari ST/TT (Software Emu)
>Sinclair ZX81 Atari ST/TT (Software Emu)
>Sinclair ZX Spectrum Atari ST/TT (Software Emu)
> Hobbit Micro (exUSSR)
>CPM Atari ST/TT (Software Emu)
Sinclair ZX81 PC8300 (Honk Kong)
Tim Swenson
QL Hacker's Journal
Jim Haynes
>was a clone of IBM's 709x line of 36 bit machines, whose software
>became orphaned when IBM started up their 360 line.
replace 7090s in military/aerospace applications. It was designed at
one of the GE military electronics facilities. But it was not instruction
set compatible with the 7090 at all; it was a somewhat more modern machine.
However it was taken over into the commercial computer line, with a great
many teething problems. The commercial versions were models 615-625-635.
Hoping to capture some 7090 customers, especially those who would rather
switch than fight the change to 360 architecture, GE designed a combination
of hardware and software called "9SA" which was short for "704x/709x
simulator aid" The hardware connected to a port on the 635s memory and
also to a memory port on the processor. It executed a portion of the
704x/709x instruction set, mainly the fixed point arithmetic and the
control instructions. It read 7090 programs right out of memory when
doing that. When it came to an instruction it didn't support, it would
interrupt the main 635 processor, which would software-interpret the
instruction, reading values from the 9SAs registers and putting the
results back into them.
The intention was for 7090 customers to buy GE machines and use the
9SA for as long as it took them to convert their programs to GE native-mode
code. Then the 9SA machine would be taken away and sent to some other
customer. As things turned out the customers took a lot longer than
expected to convert their programs, so there was a shortage of 9SA
machines, but it was countered by the fact that fewer than expected
customers switched from IBM to GE.
--
hay...@cats.ucsc.edu
hay...@cats.bitnet
"Any clod can have the facts, but having opinions is an Art."
Charles McCabe, San Francisco Chronicle
Joe Pollock
the mid-70's. My recollection of this machine is that it was a copy right
down to the ROM's, although there were cosmetic changes to the case and
front panel, including color (orange and yellow?). There was also some
problems with software licensing, I believe.
DEC sued, and I think the producer went out of business. We had one of
these at the college I worked for at the time, and we junked it when we
couldn't get parts.
A small aside - At about the same time, I was doing some consulting for
a typesetting firm, and the owner had two of these at home (one for
spare parts). His son, about 7, would come down, boot the machine,
and play adventure... They also had one of the early micros, I think
it was an Altair, that was supposed to be the kid's machine, but he
thought the PDP was far more fun.
Peter Z. Simpson
have actually had my hands on one of these...almost got RDOS to run on
it but not quite...)
--
Peter Simpson, KA1AXY (508) 870-9837 fax: (508) 898-4212
Data General Corp. E236 p...@ficus.webo.dg.com [128.221.228.82]
Westboro, MA 01580 #include <std_disclaimer.h>
Phil Gustafson
>In article <Bs9Ep...@news.cso.uiuc.edu> berger@atropa (Mike Berger) writes:
>>Xerox, Amdahl, and CDC all made IBM mainframe clones.
>
>and Hitachi, and IPL, and at least 2 or 3 others I can't think of the names of.
>
Two Pi (later Four-Phase) and Magnuson, for two more.
Phil
Rick Kelly
>In article <1992Jul30....@cs.cornell.edu> cha...@cs.cornell.edu (Richard Chapman) writes:
>>
>>>The recent talk of various Tandy clones made me wonder how much hardware
>>>has been knocked-off over the years. These are the ones I know of:
>>
>>>Original Clones
>>
>
>
>>
>>I have read that the Soviet Union supported exactly 3 architectures at
>>one point: Clone of Intel 8080, Clone of DEC pdp-11, Clone of IBM 370.
>
>And the PDP-8. They called it a "TPA" I saw a picture of it; looked just
>like a PDP-8/l. The article pointed out that it was non-DIN compatible.
>(I think DIN was what they referred to their 360/370 clones.)
>
>What about RCA's Spectra-70?
The Soviet Union cloned the Apple II, and they also completely cloned the
IBM PC from the 8088 to a Russian version of MSDOS.
Byte reviewed the Soviet Apple II back in the early 80's. I still have the
issue around here, somewhere.
--
Rick Kelly r...@rmkhome.UUCP unixland!rmkhome!rmk r...@frog.UUCP
Warren Burstein
>But the machine of choice was PDP-11 :-)
A few months ago I participated in an meeting to help ex-CIS'ers in
Israel find work in computers. Of all the different platforms that
people said that they had experience with, the PDP-11 was the most
common. Unfortunately there are not a lot of these left in operation
in this country.
--
/|/-\/-\ In real life, the Vice President chastises Murphey Brown
|__/__/_/ for her morals. Bill Clinton plays the sax on "Arsenio
|warren@ Hall." Though "Batman Returns" is fiction, it's not too
/ nysernet.org much stranger than truth - Caryn James, The New York Times
John Whitmore
>The recent talk of various Tandy clones made me wonder how much hardware
>has been knocked-off over the years. These are the ones I know of:
>Original Clones
>------------------------------- -------------------------------
>IBM (PC/AT/etc.) [Billions and billions...]
>Apple II(+/e/c) Franklin (1000/1200), Laser 128
>Tandy Color Computer Dragon 32
>Tandy TRS-80 Video Genie
>Macintosh [Rumored. Asian and American.]
>Anything else?
Data General NOVA Digital Computer Controls 'D-116'
and later, many machines using Fairchild 9440 microprocessor were
also NOVA clones, in some sense.
John Whitmore
John B. Campbell
There was a DEC PDP-10 clone called the Foonly. Only a few went into
operation...
Maybe they should have run ads like Smucker's jelly: "With a name
like Foonly, it's got to be good."
I didn't think DEC sued Foonly.
--
****************************************************************
* * *
* John B. Campbell * This space *
* MITRE Corporation * *
* Bedford, MA 01730 * intentionally *
* (617)271-3434 * *
* <j...@mitre.org> * blank. *
* * *
****************************************************************
Neil Postlethwaite
>s.te...@ed.ac.uk (Scott Telford) writes:
>
>>I don't think the Dragon 32 was so much of a clone, just that both
>>machines were built to similar (Motorola) specifications (same video
>>chip, same Basic, same memory map..). That was the story I heard,
>>anyway.
The Dragon ran all Tandy Co-Co software.
>Does the Dragon 32 actually run OS-9? It never was very successful,
>having to compete against the C-64...
The Dragon 32 never ran OS-9. The Dragon 64, which was launched just
before Dragon Data crashed, could however.
Neil
Guy Harris
At least to some extent, so did Xerox. :-)
(How different *was* the Alto's "BCPL instruction set", or whatever it
was called, from the Nova's instruction set? And is there any truth to
the claim that the Alto's "BCPL instruction set" was Novaesque because
they already had a BCPL compiler for the Nova and it was easier to build
a Novaesque machine than to roll a new compiler?)