On Wed, 30 May 2001, Carlini, Antonio wrote:

> 	I've never seen anything that suggested that there was
> 	ever a machine called the VAX-11/784 (or 783 or 787 etc.)
> 	There are plenty of web pages out there that claim that Mach 
> 	was developed on a 784 (amongst other things). But most of
> 	these pages are obviously copies of the "master" page and I
> 	don't see anything at all authoritative on those pages.

I've seen people claim that they've seen them, but that's about it. Never
seen or heard anything really reliable about it.

> 	I've heard stories of Ontario Hydro field testing
> 	the PDP-11/74 (a dual processor PDP that did
> 	exist but was never released). 

The 11/74 can actually be up to four processors, and that machine *does*
exist, even though DEC officially deny it. I've even seen pictures of the
beast. :-)
The RSX development group used to do all their work on an
11/74. Unfortunately that machine have hardware problems now, and there is
doubt if they'll fix it or not. Probably cheaper to just scrap the machine
(sob).

Speaking of which, one of the more strange things DEC ever did was that
RSX-11M-PLUS officially supports SMP PDP-11s, but DEC claims there never
were any such machines. :-)

> 	It's asymmetric which is one of the reasons VMS
> 	dropped support for the VAX-11/782 once true
> 	SMP came along in V5.0.

Which is why I also doubt support in NetBSD will be easy...

	Johnny

Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                  ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt@update.uu.se           ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol