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Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!tektronix!tekecs!alanj
From: alanj@tekecs.UUCP (Alan Jeddeloh)
Newsgroups: net.misc
Subject: Artificially different products
Message-ID: <1604@tekecs.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 8-Jul-83 12:24:49 EDT
Article-I.D.: tekecs.1604
Posted: Fri Jul  8 12:24:49 1983
Date-Received: Sat, 9-Jul-83 13:11:51 EDT
Lines: 27


Ah, yes! the DL-11 ...
Later on DEC caught on and started de-populating the boards.
If you bought a DL-11A, you got a board minus the RS232 drivers,
a DL-11C was minus the current loop drivers.  You had to buy
a DL-11E to get everything.

Back when I was an applications engineer for a Tektronix marketing
group I used to keep one of the "good" boards in my desk drawer
for building up special systems.

As for other manufacturers, CDC also had a few up its sleeve.

I think difference between a CDC 3300 and a CDC 3170 was the crystal
on the master clock card.  (The 3170/3300 were 24-bit, single
accumulator, 1's complement, and had virtual memory (before IBM).
It did take them a while to get their business instruction unit
(string edits/moves/compares &c) to be able to restart after a
page fault, but they did it.)

I also seem to recall that the difference between some of the original
CDC 6000-series was that on the lower performance models the program
counters on some of the Peripheral Processors were wired to zero.
I think that had something to do with the "barrel" architecture
of the PP's -- they couldn't delete any of the circuitry because it
was timeshared between the PP's.  Can anyone knowledgeable on the
CDC 6000's confirm or deny?