3 ms·
LMI Lambda, which is essentially Explorer's direct ancestor, used NuBus as well, including the possibility of putting a 68k Unix system as a board into the card
by p_l 3y ago
LMI Lambda, which is essentially Explorer's direct ancestor, used NuBus as well, including the possibility of putting a 68k Unix system as a board into the card cage.
The biggest theoretical setup AFAIK was a 2X2 Lambda + Unix card - essentially two LMI Lambda CPUs, the Unix CPU, plus memory cards.
The I/O subsystem ran from yet another CPU that implemented access to multibus cards and served as front end processor for management purposes.
The NuBus interface itself AFAIK predates 32bit VMEbus, being designed in late 1970s as part of NuMachine project.
- johndoe0815 3y agoInteresting - it seems that TI bought a 25 percent equity in LMI in 1983. This was even mentioned in the New York Times back then... https://www.nytimes.com/1983/09/02/business/lisp-stake-bought.html https://www.nytimes.com/1983/09/02/business/lisp-stake-bough...
- pinewurst 3y agoEffectively it was TI that put LMI out of business, even more so than Symbolics, by selling their OS and architecture in a lower cost, more deeply discounted configuration.
- Suzuran 3y agoThere was a 4x4 machine, but it was pushing the power supplies to their extreme limits. Not many were sold. Edit: You got the -PLUS suffix by adding the Unix processor, of which there could be only one, so the largest configuration would be a LAMBDA-4x4-PLUS having four Lisp processors (and consoles) sharing a Unix.
- p_l 3y agoNice! I only ever came upon reference to 2x2, but it seemed rather obvious that there wasn't a hard limit - I just thought you couldn't fit more into card cage.
- Suzuran 3y agoThere is a hard limit imposed by the backplane - It's four though, not two. Each Lambda processor is four boards and they share a 4-slot private interconnect in the third row of the backplane. Four such interconnects are provided.