15 Feb
2002
15 Feb
'02
3:38 p.m.
Hi,
so I just came home from BSDcon 2002 (was nice to see all the
old names as life people with noses in their faces.) Anyway
I just came home and there my new KFQSA card I got on eBay was
in the mail. So, now I can finally use some of my DSSI disks
that I bought for the time I'd get a KFMSA, now I get to use
the in my uVAX instead of having to bother with formatting that
MFM disk :-).
I don't know much about DSSI however and I'm not sure I have
all the pieces I need. I have a KFQSA, a 50-60 pin cable,
round and two connectors each side, then a bus cable, same
number of pins to be connected to that round cable and 3
connectors, apparently for three drives. Good. But at the
end of that cable is a male connector with about half as
many pins. What is that for, please don't say it's a terminator,
where the heck would I get such a terminator from? Could I
just connect the round cable directly to one DSSI drive without
that bus cable, such that I would not need that terminator?
Then there are some DIP switches on the card, what are they
for?
And of course the drives have front panels and I have three
drives and just one front panel. How essential is that front
panel?
Has anyone ever installed DSSI in a uVAX-II with the small
cabinet? It's pretty tight in there. How about this: right
now there is that cable for the RQDX3 that goes into the
front part of the box and apparently is spliced there to
connect to the MFM drive and the RX33/50 (?) floppy drive.
What if I throw all this stuff out and use that flat cable
to route the KFQSA into the front and hook up the DSSI
drive where I have the MFM drive now and put in a TK50
where the RX50 is now. Anyone ever done that?
I must also say I really appreciate the VAXBI and XMI busses
with their zero-insertion force and their clean way of
connecting peripherals all to the backplane instead of
just anywhere in the front. The way these Q-BUS and UNIBUS cards
are jammed into their slots with all the cables squeezed
between those cards, and the cards all bent to make room for
the cables and connectors is not beautiful, if not frightening.
Isn't that terribly rough on the hardware?
regards
-Gunther
--
Gunther Schadow, M.D., Ph.D. gschadow(a)regenstrief.org
Medical Information Scientist Regenstrief Institute for Health Care
Adjunct Assistant Professor Indiana University School of Medicine
tel:1(317)630-7960 http://aurora.regenstrief.org