10 Aug
2026
10 Aug
'26
2:56 p.m.
I am being slammed by email today so I will have to be brief.
I was hired in 1987 by Mizar, Incorporated, to bring up AT&T
SVR4 v2 Unix (sic) for them to sell as a VMEBus product. IIRC my
development machine at that time had a 321SB board in it. My
understanding is that the only difference between it and the 3B2
machines was the bus interface. VMEBus was going to be "the future"
of expansion buses for industrial computers at that time.
Even by the standards of the time this CPU was underpowered. IIRC
we made our own boards based on it. (VMEBus master boards made by
manufacturers who did not specialize in VMEBus, as we did, tended not
to be well-designed, and only implemented a minimum of features.
Their multiple bus master support was non-existant, for instance.)
The product did not sell. After a year they switched me over
to the design of the next "future" processor, a sparc32 board.
That did not sell well, either.
Then we tried to sell the idea of MIPS-based boards to interested
customers but not much happened.
During that time Mizar was making most of its money off the 68k
product lines. The 68000-, 68010-, and 68020- VMEBus machines
were still selling well. We were selling these machines either
to run bare-metal, PDOS, or vxWorks. (The latter was what I was
assigned to the whole time.)
Older people will recall that Motorola "lost its mojo" around that
time and were having trouble scaling up the 68040 to faster clock
speeds (this is because much of their technical design team walked
out the door to start Ross Technology.) So we were trying to figure
out what we could offer to stay competitive.
tl;dr: we didn't. I left at the end of 1989 after running my mouth
to management too much.
I can go on a treasure-hunt to see what I still have from those days
but it won't be this week. I do have manuals and maybe even a board
or two.
AFAIK no one else ever even got AT&T-based processors out the door
at all.
mcl