4 Oct
1999
4 Oct
'99
5:16 a.m.
> RXV11 is only compatable with the DEC RX01. The
H11 Floppy used a Heath
> interface. If you use the heath floppy with RXV11 nothing happens.
By nothing happens I mean no harm, not useful.
OK. I'll go back to the card and get it working.
Worst case, I'll pull
all the sockets and solder in machine-pin ones. I'd rather not; it's lots
of work. I observed substantial oxidation of the plating on the ICs I did
remove and test (I can't test DEC bus chips with my IC tester, only CMOS,
TTL and DRAM).
It's unlikely there are bad chips. bad sockets however are teh bain of
heathkits.
Manuals try heathkit of whatever their name is now.
It looks dodgy, but then most of the Heath stuff looks
less solid to me.
It worked. But it was nowhere near as durable as the DEC cards.
Don't got it. I have several 32Kw and 128Kw
boards from 11/23s, etc., and
a few 4kW and 16kW boards from my LSI-11s (knee-high formica-topped rolly
DEC cabs w/RX01 and 11/03 inside).
Just about everyone upgraded to 11/23 and dec cards for performance
reasons.
The card itself is about as simple as any Qbus card.
It is, I take it,
supposed to be nominally RXV11 compatible from a driver standpoint, yes?
Yes, RT11 DX (rxv11). The card relies on the heath drives being smartend
with a z80 card in them. If you have the heath drives the hub clamps
and pressure pads should be inspected.
If not, then that's part of my problem. I do
boot, the disks to appear to
read in an OS, then the system hangs, but that could be as a result of my
card only working if it is *not* at the end of an unbroken grant chain (with
a gap in the bus, the disks read but the system does not boot; without a gap
in the bus, the CPU does not even bring up the boot message).
That or not enough memeory or the console card at wrong address or RTC
enabled.
So far, the only problem I appear to have is that the
belt on DX1 has either
broken or fallen off. The motor is turning, but not the hub. I haven't
pulled the drive to check yet. On the bright side, the mechanisms appear to
have a 50-pin edge connector, suggesting that they are standard from that
standpoint. I expect that the hub motors are either 110V or 24V.
Fairly standard, you might get other drives to work but jumper settings
are not in my known info.
I did spot the obvious format switch on the front of
the disk unit, but no
idea how to use it. I now wish that I'd picked up a couple more boxes of
media from a friend's business about eight years ago. He had a pallet of 8"
disks that he was selling for more money that I was willing to pay.
The switch enabled formatting but you needed the heath format program
if memory serves.
One of the gems I have in the Heath pile is an
unassembled backplane. I don't
know if all the connectors are there or not and I don't have a second case
for it, but I've got at least part of one to "attract" the rest of it.
;) Mine is complete and I knew the original owner (and same for most of
the boards). What I have has been following me for close to 18 years and
are original from back 1979!
FYI 11/03 cpu cards are common as house flies. Same for standard DLV11,
and DEC memory, heath cards are scarce and often have socket problems
or look like they were soldered with a torch.
Allison