10 May
2004
10 May
'04
4:27 a.m.
I've got an 80MB drive from a Mac LCIII lined up to
replce the 40MB
drive in there with the bearing fault... assuming that SCSI drives for
use with Apple machines work with everything else...
I think Apple just added to what was there, I've used a 20MB Apple
SCSI drive on a PDP-11 when I needed a drive that was physically
smaller than 30MB to transfer some data.
I'm not sure where the split is between what's
in ROM and what's on the
hard drive. When it starts up, it mentions loading the hard disk driver
- which is presumably in ROM :-) Then it boots into a windowed
environment (GEM?), but I'm not sure if that loads off the hard drive
(in which case I'd like to get install media for that) or if that's also
in ROM.
The GUI and all of the basic OS are in ROM. I'm assuming that you
can have some kind of OS extensions on the HD. Not really to sure,
I'm not that familiar with TOS.
What about formatting a new hard drive? Is the
formatter in ROM? (In
which case is there a low level setup type of routine in ROM I somehow
access pre-boot?) Or is there a seperate floppy (which I don't have)
which contains hard disk formatter / partitioner etc.?
Good question, this is what I'm wondering myself.
I am quite keen to get BSD on this. Not sure if
that'd also allow me to
also use the LAN port to connect to an Apple network or not, but there's
always PPP over a serial link I suppose.
Wonder if they can be dual-booted into BSD and a more traditional
desktop enviroment....
I'm guessing that BSD is started from TOS on these systems somehow.
I never got around to trying to install BSD or Linux on mine. IIRC,
the Serial ports are wicked fast, you'd want to hook them up to
something like 16550 UART's on a PC. There was a project to adapt
the SCSI-to-Ethernet adapters for the Mac to work on these a few
years ago, I don't know whatever happened with that.
I truthfully can't see a good reason to install Unix on one of these
systems these days. You should be able to get a PC that will do it
better and faster for free. Besides, how much RAM does your TT030
have?
Zane
--
--
| Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh(a)aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast |
| | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
| Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, |
| PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. |
| http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |