13 Dec
2010
13 Dec
'10
12:31 p.m.
From: Pontus Pihlgren
Sent: Saturday, December 11, 2010 1:12 AM
On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 05:37:33PM -0500, William Donzelli wrote:
> The problem with running a KS10 is that there is a
very restrictive
> list of disks and tapes it will play with.
Didn't Ian and the guys at the Living Computer
Museum (formerly
PDPplanet) work on a massbuss "emulator" of sorts? That should be
modifiable to work with the 18 bit KS-10 version?
Or am I missing something? I'm unsure what
happened with that project.
As it happens, we are about to send out the artwork for the second revision
of the Massbus Disk Emulator this week (a project which predates Ian by a
couple of years!). We've been waiting for Rabbit to bring out a faster
processor than the one in the original design, and changing the way that
register shadowing is done.
There is no such thing, by the way, as "the 18 bit KS-10 version"--Massbus
is Massbus, no matter whether it is talking to an RH20 on a KL-10, an RH70
on a PDP-11/70, an RH15 on a PDP-15, or an RH11 on other PDP-11 models.
They're *all* 18 bits of data, though the 16-bit systems don't use 2 bits
of that.
Anyway, the MDE looks like a string of disks on a Massbus channel (only
RP06 currently, but that will change soon) to the vintage system. Disk
images are represented as directories of track files on an FTP server.
(100baseT Ethernet keeps up with Massbus very nicely.)
Once we have more than the breadboard prototype running (on the 2065 that
Ian mentioned up-thread), we'll hook one to a KS-10, as well as to our
PDP-11/70 and PDP-11/45, and see what we can shake loose.
Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Server Engineer
Vulcan, Inc.
505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900
Seattle, WA 98104
mailto:RichA at vulcan.com
mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org
http://www.PDPplanet.org/
http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/