26 Dec
2015
26 Dec
'15
4:16 a.m.
I
On 12/25/15 5:55 PM, Mike Ross wrote:
What about IBM channel-attached DASD?
There are various CPUs lying around in private collections and museums
- System/360s; System/370s; System/3 Model 15s; all used
channel-attached DASD: and working reliable disks are much rarer than
the damn CPUs!
It's typical of most of the vintage gear. Folks save the CPUs
and ditch
the peripherals.
Questions:
2. To those with hardware design experience: how big a task do you
reckon it would be to do this as a home-brew with modern hardware -
exactly as Dave did with his MFM emulator? Is it feasible? Do the
entire thing in software - Pi or Arduino or FPGA - with appropriate
driver electronics to drive a channel interface?
I've looked at this briefly.
I would expect that there will have to be
more than just
software. Talking with David re: MFM emulator, that was at about the
limit of what
could be done with S/W. Anything else would require at least *some* H/W.
What do people reckon would be the best target for
emulation? 3340
springs to mind initially... would that work on machines as old as
System/360s? It's about the *only* option for 5415 DASD...
From my limited
experience, I would think that any of the CCK drives
would be
reasonable targets. I think once you get one (3330?) the others should
follow fairly
easily. I think once you've emulated the controller, supporting the
different drives
should be fairly straightforward.
(To digress briefly - a modern reimplementation of something like the
Setasi Massbus disk emulator would also be very useful; Rich - weren't
LCM working on something like that?)
Again, I've looked at it. 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. It'll be a lot of reading (and fully understanding) the
drive schematics and
then trying to generalize it.
TTFN - Guy