18 Oct
2016
18 Oct
'16
11:26 a.m.
From: Noel Chiappa
Sent: Monday, October 17, 2016 7:21 PM
> From: Ian S. King
>> Does anyone know anything about the status of
the plans to open-source
>> it?
> I've made some inquries, stay tuned....
OK, thanks!
>> Can you briefly describe what it was?
I'm still curious about what it was: was it a
stand-alone board with a
separate power supply, or did it plug into some sort of backplane? Did it
use something like SD cards for storage? And what was the MASSBUS
connection like: a set of 3 Berg headers into which one plugged the flat
cables, or was there some oddball connector that wound up connected to a
standard MASSBUS connector?
There have been 2 generations of Massbus Disk Emulator (MDE) at LCM. The
one of which people have seen pictures was the first generation, created
when there were only 2 people working on the collection which became the
museum years later.
This was a breadboarded prototype which supported 4 emulated RP06 disks,
represented by directories of track files, each representing 20 sectors of
128 36-bit words. These mimicked the physical layout of the data on disk,
where each 18 bits of data has an associated parity bit; this was stored as
3 8-bit bytes (3rd byte being 2 data + overall parity). The MDE itself was
made up of a Rabbit and 3 PICs; the driver/receiver portion of the board
terminated the Massbus. Standard Massbus cables connected it to the 2065
running Tops-10. Data was transferred via FTP over a 100baseT crossover
cable connected to a Slackware server; the Rabbit was able to keep up with
4 drives at this speed, but a 5th drive (MDE could in theory represent an
entire 8-drive string) would cause data dropouts on all units.
Various improvements were attempted on this (work with Unibus on a 2020, for
example), but it was never quite stable enough.
MDE 2.0 was created by a different engineer with lots of resources thrown at
him. He replaced the Rabbit and PICs with a Mesa 5i22 Anything I/O card
(includes a Xilinx Spartan-III FPGA) that plugs directly into the PCI bus in
a server-class X86-64 box, and used a revision of a separate driver/receiver
card designed for MDE 1.0 to connect to the Massbus, still via standard
cables. An outside contractor wrote a control program for the PC side which
runs under Windows 2008/2012 Server.
MDE 2.0 supports SimH-format RP07 and RP06 disk drive images. There is also
a variant for tape drive emulation called the MTE, which reads and writes to
SimH-format tape files.
We currently run the DECSYSTEM-2065 (public Tops-10 v7.04), DECsystem-1070
(public Tops-10 v6.03A), PDP-11/70 (public Unix v7), and DECSYSTEM-1095
(under development: WAITS operating system from Stanford Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory) using MDEs. The two KL-10 systems also have an MTE
apiece; we haven't needed tape service on the KI-10 or the 11/70 so far.
Rich
Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computer Museum
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134
mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org
http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/