The Sterling Engine and the Minimum

The following is from an email sent by M.J.G. Veltman to David N. Williams on April 24, 2015, answering a question about what the "Sterling engine" was, and how it was related to the Minimum.
When Thom Sterling and I started out the idea was to make a machine centered around the new Motorola CPU that could handle eight floating point co-processors. I thought that it would be a good idea to start with a modest project, namely a machine with just a 68000. That became the Sterling engine. It had no disk, and a quite large e-prom memory. Its size was about 20 x 30 x 6 cm. We got it to work, including some operating system, and it could run Schoonschip, but we used it later mostly to burn e-proms (among others for the little box containing Schoonschip that we made for the Atari).

There is nothing remaining of that machine, I recently threw away the last remnants as it did not function any more. I still have an Atari and one of those little boxes (see attached picture).

Then we discovered that a company in Chicago produced a board including one floating point co-processor and we decided to buy that one. You know the machine of which we made ten altogether and of which at least one was still around the last time I visited Ann Arbor. I also do have one left, but it does not work any more because the hard disk is stuck.

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