SunOS ancient history questions

[dupuy at cs.columbia.edu]

|I've recently acquired several Central Data 8-port Multibus serial cards,
|and would like to put them to use in my Sun-2/120. ...  Does anyone have a
|driver for this card that works under 3.5?

I thought that Sun Consulting Services had a "special" which supported
this device under 2.x or 3.x, but I wasn't able to find any reference to
it.  You could try calling them anyhow, but it would probably be charged
at Time and Materials costs, which is probably more than you want to
spend.

|One other thing I noticed in my wanderings around SunOS 1.0 was a
|reference to a "ropc" driver.

This is the infamouse Sun-2 raster-op chip, which did raster-ops in
hardware, very quickly.  However, it turned out that with some tricky
coding, they could be done just as fast in software on the CPU, with less
overhead, and zero hardware cost.  So there's no raster-op chip on the
Sun-3.  The only problem was that certain vendors (notably Interleaf, but
probably others, too) had used the ropc device in their programs, and so
it had to be supported for a time, while they modified their programs.
Support was probably dropped in some 3.x release.  If you use the pixrect
library (and you should) you won't ever need the ropc device.

inet: dupuy at cs.columbia.edu
uucp: ...!rutgers!cs.columbia.edu!dupuy