On Fri, Feb 14, 2020 at 4:36 PM jim stephens via cctalk <[email protected]> wrote: > SMD external cables probably weren't that common. The systems I saw > which were of such as 4/280 etc, rack mounted had the cabling internal > to the bays and were of the ribbon variety. They used VME bus cards in > a large size carrier for the controllers in the system frame. The > system frame had cards that were about 18" high with an extra bus > connector. But if you aligned the VME cars to fit two of them, there > was apparently a vme bus. > > Those systems that i saw had either 68k processors, or early Sparc > processors. The sun boards used all three bus connectors and the other > vendor boards as I sad were usually mounted in a sun dimensioned carrier > frame. > > And reason for all this explanation was that they used a third part > vendor's SMD interface. > > As to the connections to go outside the rack, all the systems I saw had > 2 or so smd drives and were racked in a 6' bay with room for a tape > drive at the top, system in the center, and drives @ the bottom, and so > no need for external.
For what it's worth, my Sun 3/140 has a Fujitsu 9-track at the top of the rack, and two Eagles at the bottom of the rack (VME chassis in the middle), wired to the SMD disk controller with the "external" D-sub cables, and it's all contained within one rack. I haven't seen anyone but Sun using this type of cabling. I have a few *long* shielded ribbon cables from other SMD drives/machines that I acquired at some point - I think everyone else probably just ran a flat cable instead. Pat
