On the 11/74 you more or less had this, in the form of hotplugging whole bus segments. One
a bus segment was disconnected, you could power it off, and remove controllers if you
wanted.
This reminds me of a conversation I overheard at an RSX Magic Session, at a DECUS
symposium in the 80s. A customer was asking Brian McCarthy, a noted RSX developer, a lot
of questions about the legendary 11/74 and the RSX11M+ additions that had been made to
support it. They were discussing the multiple Unibuses (Unibusen? Unibeese?) and the
software that controls them. The user pointed out that the three letter task name for the
Host Reconfiguration Task (HRC...) was a little tortured - it would have made more sense
to be HRT. Brian said that internally they had called it Hercules, and HRC was the three
letter abbreviation they chose for it. The user asks, "Why Hercules?". Brian
said that it took a Hercules to wrestle the three headed dog that was the device
configuration databases involved into submission.
--
Lee K. Gleason N5ZMR
Control-G Consultants
lee.gleason at
comcast.net
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