26 Dec
2015
26 Dec
'15
6:03 a.m.
On Dec 27, 2015 2:36 AM, "Noel Chiappa" <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:
ditch
that
with
From: Guy Sotomayor
> It's typical of most of the vintage gear. Folks save the CPUs and
the
peripherals.
It's not entirely sloth and stupidity, though. Disk drives in particular
(usually the biggest issue in this area) are complex precision machinery operate at very high speeds, etc, and working on them
is a formidable job,
and requires specialized parts which are, in general, no longer available.
> I think the biggest problem is that there isn't a spec per-se on
> Massbus. A lot of reverse engineering will be required to make it
work
properly in
all cases.
If it were done, though, that would be wonderful, especially for people PDP-11/70's; the UNIBUS on those machines is
reputedly the slowest of any
PDP-11, so having mass storage on the MASSBUS is really necessary for good
performance. (Apologies for my -11 centrism in an IBM-focused thread...
:-)
No apologies needed.
Yea more: pdp-10s. Massbus is the *only* option for those. There are KS10
CPUs in particular - including mine - lying idle for want of Massbus
storage. I'm nearly there; I have a beautiful RM03 which should work - but
no bootable packs. I have a bunch of -10 RP06 packs - but no drives. I
don't have an operable Massbus tape.
But finding the connectors (and probably the cables
too) is going to be a
cast-iron nightmare. Maybe we could settle on an alternative (the way I
think
we should switch to pairs of dual cards with
Berg/DuPont headers, with
standard flat cables between them, to replace the now-unobtainable
BC11-A's -
DEC showed this works, with the M9014/M9042..)
Noel
Certainly no need to slavishly reproduce the connectors and cables.
Emulation could plug in at the Berg level, direct to the Massbus
controller - or even at the board level, plugging straight into the
backplane (c.f. Guy's MEM-11) and replace the controller too.
Mike