• COHERENT Z8000

    From Udo Munk@21:1/5 to All on Wed Jan 8 13:15:44 2020
    These days a discussion came up about Ithaca S100 bus systems in the S100 group.
    I knew that MWC used a DSP 8000 S100 box from Ithaca to build the Z8000 version of COHERENT, so I asked there if anyone has seen it.

    Also the Commodore 900 system was discussed because MWC provided COHERENT
    as OS for the box, which then never was produced by Commodore in favour of the Amiga system.

    Whatever, while googling around I found out that some C-900 systems survived, most were called back by Commodore and destroyed though. But disk images were archived as well as the COHERENT manuals for the system.

    I talked to Bob Swartz if it is OK to mess with the bits and if this is covered by the
    MWC license and Bob gave his OK. So I put disk images and manuals at my COHERENT
    site:

    https://www.autometer.de/unix4fun/coherent/index.html

    Because hardware of the Commodore 900 and the Ithaca DPS systems is rare nowadays it probably requires building of emulations of such Z8000 systems
    for being able to use the stuff. So if there is any interest or if you want to participate in such a system revival feel free to post here or contact me by private email.

    I have used a C-900 running COHERENT once for maybe a hour, probably in 1985.
    I was seeing the local Commodore distributor for new stuff, we were using their systems a lot for lab automatisation, mostly because of the IEEE bus, which interfaced to a lot of lab equipment without further hardware interfaces.
    The distributer had ONE box available to show off the new system and I used uemacs
    to type in hello.c and compile it on the box. They said it would be released soon
    and would cost 9999 german marks. Not cheap, ca. what an OK middle class car costed at that time, but affordable with some saving for such a workstation. And then Commodore canned the box :-(

    Oh well, maybe it's possible to get one (emulated) now decades later in working condition ...

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