[LMH]MicroExplorer

[James A. Crippen]

"Chad Dougherty" <crd@unlambda.com> writes:

> There was a microexplorer in apparently decent working order being
> auctioned on marketplace.vintage.org.  It went for $163.
>
> damn.  I should've been paying closer attention.
>
> Where does the microexplorer fall in the product line?

It followed the Explorer II and Explorer LX, AFAIK. But it came out
before the MacIvory cards did from Symbolics. I don't think Symbolics
might have made the MacIvories if it wasn't for the MicroExplorer. In
fact, Symbolics had to do a lot more hardware work to get the Ivory
talking to the Mac. TI however just had to rearrange their NuBus stuff
since Apple used a similar NuBus. I imagine that the idea for the
MicroExplorer probably originated from some hardware person noticing
that the two systems both used the same bus architecture.

I think the idea for the Symbolics UX400 probably came about for a
similar reason. The Symbolics XL400 used VME as its backplane. So did
the Sun 3 series of machines. So it didn't seem difficult to make a
VME-based Ivory that would talk to Sun's hardware instead of to
Symbolics's.

That's my thoughts, anyway.

'james

-- 
James A. Crippen <james at unlambda.com> Lambda Unlimited
61.2204N, -149.8964W                     Recursion 'R' Us
Anchorage, Alaska, USA, Earth            Y = \f.(\x.f(xx))(\x.f(xx))