10 Jun
2009
10 Jun
'09
1:30 p.m.
On Wed, 10 Jun 2009, Rich Alderson wrote:
I was wondering about this, due to where the machine came from it seemed
unlikely that any HD's or media would have escaped distruction.
From: Zane H.
Healy
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2009 11:44 AM
On Wed, 10 Jun 2009, Ian King wrote:
> No. It is missing the swapping disk.
Replacing it could be done, but it
> would be a non-trivial (and non-cheap) enterprise. -- Ian
Ian is not quite correct in this statement. The HDAs from the Winchester-
technology disk drives were removed before the machine was moved out of its
computer room. It's not *just* the swapping disks, it's *all* the disks. These appear to be CDC drives (9670?) similar to the
DEC RP07. A search
throughout the Honeywell universe turned up no surviving examples of these
drives, nor HDAs for same.
I'm not familiar with the RP07's, but the look close. There is a good
chance I have details on the models.
IBM DASD can connect to a Multics system using an
interface created by one of
the long time Multicians for one of his customers. The first issue is that you
have to replace the bus-and-tag connectors with FIPS standard connectors.
That is good to know.
We have been told (by eminent Multicians) that there
are differences in the
electronics between a DPS-8 (GCOS) and a DPS-8M (Multics) CPU.
I don't doubt that.
I'd love to see a emulator capable of running Multic's and DPS-8, but at the
same time, I have doubts Group Bull would let copies of GCOS-8 out into the
wild.
Zane