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Motorola Series 900

Overview

The Series 900 were very nice, stylish looking, stackable m88k-based computer systems. They were available in a lot of different configurations based on different MVME boards, including:

It is very well possible to use a different MVME board as the CPU, e.g. a MVME197SP.

The basic configuration consisted of two modules:

  1. The lower module housed the power supply and the actual VME-cage with four 6U-slots. Installed VME cards consisted of the CPU-board (see above), an I/O-board (not a P2-board!) and in most cases also a multi-port serial board.
    The I/O-board contains the following I/O-ports (from left to right):
    • HD68 SCSI, although this is a wide-SCSI-connector, only narrow-SCSI is perfomed with the existing MVME88k boards (they only have narrow-capable SCSI-controllers).
    • CONTROL, RJ45-port, connects to the SCSI-enclosure.
    • SP4/UPS, serial RJ45-port, to connect to an UPS.
    • SP3, serial RJ45-port.
    • SP2/TEL, serial RJ45-port, to connect to a modem.
    • CONSOLE, serial RJ45-port, to connect a serial console (pinout see Reference 1 below).
    • 10 BASE T, RJ45-port for an Ethernet connection.
    • ETHERNET, AUI-port for an Ethernet connection.
  2. The upper module housed the bays for two 5.25" SE- SCSI removable media drives and two 3.5" SCSI harddrives in special trays.

More VME and drive-modules can be stacked onto the system to provide more VME-slots and more room for drives.

Operating Systems

References

  1. Pinout for the RJ45 serial port to connect to a "standard" DB25 serial connector. Taken from an USENET post from Martin Etteldorf.

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