[Scottish] For comparing VM technologies: VMKNOPPIX released

[Andrew Back]

On Fri, 9 Mar 2007, Dan Shearer wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 08, 2007 at 01:41:44PM +0000, Andrew Back wrote:
>
> Never heard of DIPOS, does it run under simh by any chance?

Not that I know of. It ran on a Siemens-Nixdorf device called a TCU, 
complete with 70Mb full-height 5 1/4" MFM hard drive, a processor card the 
size of an opened telephone book, and accompanying comms cards of the 
same size. Each comms card could drive up to 4 terminals on a serial based 
4-wire LAN, where terminals were hooked up in paralell, and with two 
terminating resistors at the end. Terminals were Siemens PCs with a HDLC 
adapter for the LAN and some kind of terminal emulation. You could toggle 
between one screen where your current app ran, and another where you could 
'load segments into partitions'. The only other thing I remember is you 
booted and built the TCU from tapes, and had to edit a dataset to change 
it's X.25 address (used in communicating back to a central mainframe 
after you turned a key on the front to the 'overnight processing' 
position). British Gas had one in every shop around 1993, and I had 
the dubious pleasure of building and installing over about 70 of the 
250+. I think DIPOS meant DIn Point-of-sale Operating System. Yes, DIN as 
in standards, well it was German.

I'd actually quite like one just because it was so ridiculous. But then I 
am currently searching for an IBM 3270 terminal and 3174 controller...

Andrew