On Wed, 3 Jun 1998, Burkhard Hennig wrote:

> Varga Akos Endre wrote:
> > 
> > Hm, I don't know about that machine, but I don't think that the romanian
> > engineers were able to shrink that big beast... Believe me ;) but 
>     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> why not???
> All countries in east-europe (commicon or so), inclusive east-germany (i
> mean befor 1989) where be able to produce derivate of pdp and vax! And

I know they did, I've seen lot of those machines, the russian SM-4,
which was a PDP-11/40 (they say...), hungarian TPAs (many of them are
still in use, man are they robust:), I also have a russian/hungarian
F-11. And I have also seen EC-machines, clones of IBM 360's and 370's.. 
But to shrink a 780 into a washing machine-sized box, that sounds strange
to me, if they were able, why on earth didn't they clone a 8xxx? And
if they did it, then why did everyone used the big 11/780-sized 11/780
clones?

> produziert 32-Bit-Rechner (ROTFL)). I will say, why should romanian
> engineer not be able??? Are they bad engineers?

No, but their manufacturing facilities (and all those of the "eastern"
countries) had many problems even with SSI/MSI-type stuff... And to build
such a machine would require integrating all those SSI/MSI components
into LSI or VLSI chips I think...

> I have some pictures...                                   

Wow, I would love to see this! Was it a prototype only, or was it a
production-line machine? And did they said that it worked, or did
anybody see that? I've also heard wild stories about these machines,
but only half of them were true...

  /   ___ _  _ ___ ____ ___ ___  
 /__//__///_///__   /  /_   /  ) Varga Akos Endre   hamster@netweb.hu
/  //  //   /___/  /  /__  /  (   www.netweb.hu/hamster/english.html
----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Old Irons          http://www.netweb.hu/hamster/oldiron/e_index.html
----------------------------------------------------------------------