25 Feb
2009
25 Feb
'09
12:19 p.m.
On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 2:55 PM, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
On Feb 25, 2009, at 2:47 PM, Ethan Dicks wrote:
Yes. I still have it, but the drive has been dead since before I got
in 20 years ago.
Good to know. ?Mine happens to be attached to a 3rd party controller
(it came in a Dataram chassis with a Rodime 10MB disk imitating an
RL02 via a DQ614), so it _can_ lay down RX01 headers on a blank disk.
I haven't ever had to do it, but it might come in handy some time.
?Umm...a Dataram chassis with a Rodime 10MB disk in it?? ?That wouldn't happen to be an A22, would it? ?I
love those chassis, and
coincidentally, not even an hour ago, I just exchanged mail with my
childhood PDP mentor in NJ in which he offered to give me one of those.
I don't know the exact model, but if you sent me pictures, I'd
probably recognize it. I can't easily get to mine or I'd take
pictures for you.
We bought it at Software Results sometime before 1986, IIRC. It was
many thousands of dollars and pretty much never did what it was meant
to do. I ended up with it because nobody could make it work and I
think we were kinda left out in the cold for vendor support. ISTR
getting something going with the floppy controller, but we had no docs
on the DQ614 at the time (I think someone on the list sent me
something a while back) so I never saw this thing do much more than
run ODT.
It seems to be a nice (large) desktop package. At the time I saw
this, my small DEC experience was PDP-8s and the smaller PDP-11s like
the 11/34 and 11/24 (the /24 was the accounting machine, running RSTS
on 4 RL02s for OS and data). The Dataram box was, to me, a good-sized
"personal PDP-11" packaging. The BA23, when it came out, was clearly
intended for single-user or very small (2-4) groups, but prior to
that, all I'd ever seen was racked.
-ethan