> On Sun, 7 Oct 2001, Anders Magnusson wrote:
> Hm, I had to check this in the "VAX Hardware Handbook" :-)
>
> The "basic" 11/782 has a master CPU with 2 MBA, 1 UBA, 512KB local memory,
> a MA780 with 256KB shared mem and a slave CPU without I/O adapters but
> with 256K local mem.  The machine was easily expanded with I/O adapters on
> the slave CPU and with more memory, both local and shared. It was also
> sold as a "dual 11/780 system" where it had already been equipped with
> I/O adapters on the slave, and just used the memory as a fast way to
> communicate. The 11/782 that smugglers were trying to get over to the
> Soviet Union ~20 years ago were such machine; I was offered it some years
> ago from FOA (the Swedish Defence research centre), and it was _very_
> well equipped :-)
>
> -- Ragge

I am curious how the 11/782 contrasts with the dual 11/780's we used
at Purdue.

The machines are described in the paper at
http://ghg.ecn.purdue.edu/~ghg/vax/paper.html

It looks like these were SMP machines as far as the hardware, but
the software used one processor as a master for the kernel and user
mode and the other processor as a slave for user mode only.
It does not look like this was a limitation of the hardware, but
a limitation of the modified 4.1BSD that was run.

I remember these when I was a freshman at Purdue in the mid 80's. EE had
at least 4 of these machines as part of ECN.

Anybody know more about these machines? Might NetBSD be runnable on one?
Not that any of them still exist.

-chuck