On 6/20/07, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
On Jun 20, 2007, at 3:48 AM, Sridhar Ayengar wrote:
The 11/[750,780,785,790,795] has Massbus too.
Well they *can*. As can many PDP-11s. So yes, I suppose you have
a point!
I haven't tried to find an RH-11 recently, but an RH750 is a single
card (no backplane required), with a simple cable arrangement from the
11/750 backplane to the I/O bulkhead area (theoretically, depending on
how a modern Massbus device was constructed, one could even just run a
trio of 40-pin cables between the 11/750 backplane and the new device,
and bypass "real" Massbus cables).
I would almost expect that every 11/780 that's still running these
days has an RH780, but I doubt that's a very large pool of machines.
At least 11/750s are small enough to run in a home/office environment.
Even so, I'd think the most obvious consumers of a new Massbus
storage device would probably be either the 11/70 crowd, or, more
likely, the PDP-10 crowd. I know I'd rather run a 3.5" IDE drive
attached to some electronics than an RP07 for every-day use.
I don't have hard numbers in front of me, but am of the opinion that
there are enough hobbyists who would buy a new Massbus disk to make
the effort worthwhile. Of couse there are more who could use a Unibus
disk, but that's no reason not to take a stab at Massbus.
-ethan