Disk hardware emulation, was Re: Grandfather system RTE6/VM?

Mike Gemeny wrote: Ok, you can try to support 'classic' HP disk drives, and pay for filters, etc. Until your media wears out, or your heads need replacement. These are all life-limited components. But at some point the original disk hardware will no longer be practical to support. That time is fast approaching for all but CS/80 series disks, and they have a lifetime limit also. So at some point disk drive emulation will be the only option. Its important to develop these emulations NOW, while there are still some working 'real' disk drives to use as a reference for the development of the emulation. As for appearances, emulated drives can be built into the chassis of non-functional drives for a museum-quality appearance. But if you shun disk hardware emulation now it may not be as easy or practical to implement after the real hardware is gone. Personally, I've already bypassed emulating real HP disk drives and have developed my own disk controller for HP 1000's (not supported by RTE). RTE-IVB is such an ugly O/S I have no interest in running it, so compatibility with actual HP hardware was not as important as was making the device driver development and interface hardware as simple as possible. Now I run modern ATA (IDE) disk drives on my HP 1000's. This is just so much more practical than running real drives (including the real CS/80 disks I have). You might want to rethink your objections to disk hardware emulation. I'd be happy to help adapt my existing emulation scheme to include compatibility with 'real' HP disk drives. Another possibility would be to produce a kit-form of my existing ATA disk controller for HP collectors, but this would only be supported by HP-IL/OS, and not by RTE (unless someone wants to write an RTE driver for my controller!).