Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!oberon!eve.usc.edu!mlinar
From: mlinar@eve.usc.edu (Mitch Mlinar)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Mythical microprocessors (Linc's and MINC's)
Message-ID: <11418@oberon.USC.EDU>
Date: 7 Aug 88 20:11:01 GMT
References: <677@buengc.BU.EDU> <509@aiva.ed.ac.uk> <3423@phri.UUCP>
Sender: news@oberon.USC.EDU
Reply-To: mlinar@eve.usc.edu (Mitch Mlinar)
Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
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In article <3423@phri.UUCP> roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) writes:
>	Didn't DEC once sell something called a MINC?  As I remember, it
>was basicly an 11/23 in a funny roll-around chassis with some double-wide
>Q-bus slots designed to take analog I/O modules and the like.  Came with
>all sorts of nifty peripherals like a card with a bank of 10-turn pots
>on it (anybody for /dev/trimpot?)

That's right, Roy!  We still got one floating around the lab; the wheels are
a big plus since nobody wants it so it keeps getting pushed somewhere else.
I bet that sucker has seen 10,000 miles on it during the last year...

The MINC-11 is as you described; we had all kinds of A/D and some D/A
attached to it.  Turn pots were there for adjusting supply voltage and
sensitivity for external equipment, clock rates, etc.  Of course, it has DECs
MINC BASIC to back it up - which was really quite good for I/O stuff.

Our setup only had two 8" DS floppy drives.  I am not sure how much storage
we had, but we could stuff all the MINC BASIC and their Fortran one on disk.
The libraries manipulated all the h/w quite well, but the stuff ran S-L-O-W.

With the proliferation of the IBM-PC and I/O cards for it, this EXPENSIVE
hulk became obsolete...

-Mitch